Happy almost November!

November is a lot of things, but most of all, it’s my favorite time of the year. It’s finally cold, and I can bundle up without melting inside my jacket. Christmas is soon, Thanksgiving is sooner. People are walking around with all sorts of awesome facial hair for No Shave November, and my favorite thing of all—it’s National Novel Writing Month.

Known more affectionately as NaNoWriMo, it is a challenge to write 50,000 words in thirty days. It’s a nonprofit group with the purpose of helping people be creative and find their voice.

It is also a great way to get yourself to sit down and write that book you’ve been thinking about writing for a while now… Anyone can write, anyone can tell a story. You do it every day—a novel is just a story tackled at a slower and more detailed pace than one you might tell a friend.

If it makes you feel better, no one will read your novel. You write it on your own computer, and at the end of the month you submit it in a ‘word count validator’ which counts your words, but mixes it up so there’s no way anyone will steal your work, and no one will ever read it (unless you are brave enough to share it).

Not everyone finishes—some don’t reach the 50,000^th word. But anything you write is more than what you had before—one word at a time. That’s how a novel is written. Trust me, I’ve written a few.

Persistence, care. You have to write about what interests you. And once you push through to The End, you will have a completed novel, and have the rights to brag so. It will be a rough draft, yes. A novel that needs editing, yes. But step one is done—editing is for later. On December first, you celebrate. You just wrote a novel, and there is nothing I have experienced that feels quite so satisfying.

For those already-writers, the NaNoWriMo community is full of people who can share tips, relate to the interesting Google history that comes with writing research, and who can be excited for you and your writing endeavors, because sometimes normal people just don’t understand.

National Novel Writing Month. Remember that, even if you don’t ever participate. If you have a friend that does, do them a favor. Support and encourage them, especially in week three when all seems lost and they fall behind in their word count (it’s inevitable). Give them a pat on the head, a cup of coffee, and send them back to the computer to keep on writing.

For me, October 31^st isn’t Halloween. October 31^st is the day I finish preparing my ideas, and sit down and wait for midnight to roll around, so I can settle down, fingers on the keyboard, pen on the paper, coiled up inside and roiling with ideas. Ahead of me lies 30 days and 50,000 words to write any story that my infinite mind could possibly imagine.