Aries asks: What’s nanowrimo? Can I join (I mean, if it’s cool and all that)?

And the answer is: Hell Yeah! To both questions.

NaNoWriMo is a National Novel Writing Month. It’s a contest for people who have always wanted to write a novel someday. The basic gist? Write a 50,000 word novel in 30 days. It’s all about quantity, not quality. Not caring about quality gives you the freedom to write anything. Sure, a lot of it is crap. Most of it is. But unless you feel free to write crap, you won’t discover the good stuff. The little gems amongst the crap. Crap jewels.

People say to me, this doesn’t sound fun. But they are wrong, it’s HELLA fun. (ok, if you don’t like to write, it would not be fun.) There are writing groups in every city in America, pretty much. And many cities in Canada and around the world. There are kick off parties and wrap up parties. People meet throughout the month to write together. It can be as social, or as solitary an experience as you want.

You can’t start until November 1st, 12:01 am. And you have to finish by November 30th, 11:59 pm PST. You upload your novel to word counter and it validates your word count. No one reads your words. You could type “marshmallow” 50 thousand times and no one would be the wiser. But what’s the point of cheating? You are only cheating yourself. There are no prizes. It costs no money to sign up and it gives you the excuse to not do housework for a month. Because you are working on your novel. You are a novelist, dammit.

This is my 5th year. I won in 2003 and 2004, but did not complete my 50k in 2005 or 2006. I blame Wil. Ok, really, last year I should blame World of Warcraft which I started playing in November. Which Wil introduced me to, so it’s still his fault. I just ordered our 2007 NaNoWriMo t-shirts. I think I have enough NaNo shirts to wear one every day of the week, with an extra 8th one left over for laundry.

To read more about it, and to sign up, visit their website. But be warned, it is extremely slow right now. This happens every year when they launch the new site on October 1st, and people start to flood the forums. My nano name is, naturally, Jodiferous, and feel free to add me as a writing buddy.