Today's The Day: November First

Today begins the madness, the craziness, the insanity and lack of sleep and complete ignoring of the people around us that is NaNoWriMo.  (National Novel Writing Month, for those unfamiliar with the tortuous November tradition.  As a side note, if you're a member and logged in, you can click here to see my NaNo page!  I take buddy requests too.)

Click the image to go to the site.

Last year, I was pitifully new to NaNo.  Not so this time around.  I've been researching, taking notes, making maps, interviewing characters, making Pinterest boards, designing Spotify playlists, and otherwise preparing for a month and a half.  Today I dedicate every minute possible to beginning the monumental task of carving out at least 50,000 words in 30 days.

This is huge for all participants, but especially for me - not only because I've never written a story longer than 13,500 words, but also because last year I did the youth program.  Which meant I set my own word count goal of 20,000... and still lost.

This year, I am so determined to win, I worked ahead on all other tasks and projects I can; pre-wrote and scheduled every blog post that will go up this month (yes, I'm actually writing this post in late September); mega-outlined my story; and made a sign for my bedroom door to warn my family members: