Who’s Up for a Whole YEAR of Novel Writing?

I found this post over at Teresa Miller’s blog and thought some of you fellow NaNoWriMo’s might be interested in extending the party. I think this will be a good idea for me. I liked having the weekly and daily word counts to work towards this month, it lit a literary fire under my backside to really focus on writing and make it a priority in my life, and I’m a little afraid that now that it’s over I will fall back into my old habits. I hope not, I keep reminding myself how good it felt to get the words down and watch my daily wordcount grow. Some folks have expressed a desire to go beyond the 50K required to be a winner for NaNoWriMo, and not necessarily start revising on December 1. If you would find weekly check-ins helpful in keeping you focused on your goals maybe you would like to commit at Teresa’s blog and keep the fun alive!

I’m not sure why I seem to find deadlines helpful. I have never considered myself a competitive person but when I signed into NaNoWriMo’s site and checked other writers’ wordcounts, it fired me up to keep going and try to keep up. I think I need more writerly people in my life. It’s hard to go it alone sometimes. The encouragement and camaraderie of others in the same pickle I found really buoyed me and made me feel like “I can do this, too!” I don’t normally tell people about my desire to write. I figure they’ll just roll their eyes and say “Swell, another wannabe writer.” So I’m very tight-lipped about it in my personal life. I also think it sounds kind of pretentious when I hear other people say it, like they’re expecting everyone to ooh and ahh at them. I’ve seen the writing of some of these people, and most of it ain’t pretty, which probably explains why I don’t want to make a fool of myself by declaring myself a writer. (Anecdote Alert: I once dated a guy who sent me some of his “writing”. It was about a paragraph’s worth of some weird stream of consciousness ramble about a grassy hill and clouds, and he kept wanting to know how I liked his “short story.” I guess I didn’t gush over it enough, I never heard from him again. End of Anecdote)

So whaddya think? Onwards?