And We're Off!

It's November 1, one of the best times of the year!

Not only is today the Feast of All Saints but it is also the start of National Novel Writing Month (or NaNoWriMo for short). For those who don't know, each November sine 2006, I have participated in NaNo and "won" by successfully writing 50,000 words of fiction on a new project within the 30 days of November. Why do I do this? Simply because I can (well, and I love creative writing, so it gives me a good excuse to sit down and bash out a book at least once a year).

Anyway, the good folks at the Office of Letters and Light have progressively improved the NaNoWriMo site over the years, and one of the coolest things about NaNo are the nifty wordcount widgets that track one's progress over the course of the month. Currently, they don't seem to be up and running, but soon, you will be able to see a brief summary of my wordcount progress each day, as I'll be trying to update my blog with a report of how the writing went each day. Hopefully, this will bring this blog back around to its original intent: namely, writing.

In other news, this weekend, I made my first visit back to Austin since moving to college. It was really nice to visit many of my friends and a couple teachers from back home, and of course, I got to spend some quality time with my much-missed dog. It all passed too quickly, though, but fortunately it won't be long before I can take another short break and come back to see my high school's production of Beauty and the Beast.

While I was in Austin, I was able to go to the midnight countdown for NaNoWriMo, which I've never been able to attend in the past because Halloween always fell on a school night. This time, the extra hour with the time change helped make up for the lack of sleep I got that night, and although most of the other Austin "Wrimos" are a bit... strange (hey, keep Austin weird, ya'll), it was still exciting to hear people roaring "10 minutes!" and "2 minutes!" before counting down the final moments of October to begin writing our novels at midnight on November 1. I managed to get in about 1,300 words in the first 50 minutes before feeling too tired to continue, so I headed home.

I didn't get any more words in on Sunday, even after I headed back to College Station, but it was a good start to my fourth NaNoWriMo, and I'm going to try to post here each night with the progress I made for each day of November.

Happy novelling!