NaNoWriMo

... is short for National Novel Writing Month (which, incidentally, is November). Some friends of mine brought this event to my attention earlier this year - and had hooked me in 15 minutes. The basic premise is that without written preparation, you produce a novel of 50 000 words minimum during the month of November. You then send this novel in to the coordinators' office, they run a word count, and you either get credit or not for having produced a novel - noone even reads it.

I figure that the trick will be to keep writing. My greatest weakness as a writer is the urge to self-editorialize obsessively. So by the time I've written a sentence, you can be sure that only thing still in draft form is the final punctuation - everything else has been re-re-re-evaluated. For obvious reasons, this makes it hard to produce any volume of work, and ironically hinders the creation of a sufficiently large context to really edit appropriately. So I've been trying to get away from that. Of course, 50 000 words in 30 days means that I will need to produce approximately 1700 words per day minimum, and certainly more if I want time to edit at the end. If that doesn't get the words flowing, nothing will.

http://www.nanowrimo.org/