I know a few people who have done NaNoWriMo. For those of you who don’t know, NaNoWriMo is National Novel Writing Month it was started in 1999 in San Francisco and the aim is to write a novel, that is at least 50,000 words long, in a month. The idea is to help writers to dedicate themselves, for just 30 days, to producing as much content as possible while spending as little time as they can on editing and agonising.

The longest thing I’ve written to date is 12,000 words. It’s a short story which still needs a lot of work. I feel like I need to give myself this challenge just to see whether I can do it, to sit down everyday and write. I mean if I want to be a writer, someone who actually earns a living from it and whose only job is writing, then surely I should be able to write for an hour or two every day for a month. Surely.

I will be needing people’s support, I’m sure my facebook will be filled with whingey status updates about how I’ve either fallen behind in my word count or I’ve had to give up all forms of socialising in order to get the words done. To be honest, if I actually complete the challenge and come up with a 50K word piece of work at the end of November I will be immensely pleased with myself. If I don’t then that’s ok too, hopefully I will have some content that is worth workshopping and can be used for something later.

I know that I set myself challenges a lot and I often don’t follow them through, but this one seems like something I might actually do. Having had my work accepted into a magazine and having had some really lovely feedback on my writing from the Boroondara Writers’ Group I belong to I feel like I have a responsibility to myself to push myself. To set myself difficult challenges so that I can say ‘I did that!’. I encourage anyone else out there who is thinking of doing NaNoWriMo this year to say hi to me and we can help keep each other motivated.

At this stage I still haven’t settled on what my novel will be about, but that’s ok, I’m sure I’ll come up with something. I’ll probably be quiet here while I’m doing this challenge, but I should have some nice photo sets resulting from my upcoming trip to Queensland.

Thank you to everyone who has been wonderful in response to my posts about my depression. I think that I’m starting to get it under control. Thank you to everyone who has been supportive about the changes I’ve been making to my life and my world since I started this journey and this blog almost a year ago. Truly, thank you, I couldn’t have done it without you.