It’s that time of year again. Time for writing too late into the night and ignoring family and friends. Time for lofty goals and (too often) broken promises. Time for Nano.

November is National Novel Writing Month, an annual masochistic tradition of churning out words at a breakneck pace (unless your name is Brandon Sanderson in which case one man’s masochism is another man’s steak dinner). There’s a youth program and an everyone else program. If you’ve exceeded your teen years, that means 50000 words in one month.

Yes, I said 50000.

That’s 1666 a day. Seems reasonable. Until you do it 31 days in a row. You get behind early, then tell yourself that you’ll catch up on the long Thanksgiving weekend. Then family comes and you don’t write anything. Then it’s Nov. 30 and you have 10000 words to write.

I may sound overly pessimistic about it. And I might be. I always start the month positive, and in fact I’m positive now about this year’s project. I’m currently 1000 or so words ahead of schedule. But I’ve done this many years now and between family and work and life in general, I’ve only ever finished it once.

Some might consider that failure, and by a strict definition, it is. But even if I only reach 40000 words during a given Nanowrimo, that’s still 40000 words! That’s a lot. It’s not 40000 more than I would have written, but it’s very likely more regardless.

So if you’re a writer, join up. Even if you don’t hit the 50000, you’ll likely make a very nice dent in your work in progress project. And if you do make it, as I’ve done just the one time, man, does that feel good.

That’s all for now. Need to ration word generating time and allocate it appropriately. I’ve got a 50000 word goal to hit.