To the surprise of literally none of you…

I’m participating in NaNoWriMo this year!

NaNoWriMo is short for National Novel Writing Month and it’s a fun and frantic challenge to write at least 50,000 words in the month of November with the aim of completing the first draft of a whole book by the end of the month. If you hit the target, you’ll get fabulous prizes including a winner certificate, a paperback copy of your printed book and, of course, bragging rights. Despite the name, it’s an international event and free for everyone and anyone to participate.

Though I obviously write (and write a lot!) year-round, the community spirit of this event always pushes me towards my biggest word count month of the whole year! I’ve won more times than I can count and I absolutely love the event and its mission. This is my eleventh time participating (that I count, anyway, because the first few years all I really did was sign up for my job and never write a word) and the 20th anniversary year for the NaNoWriMo event itself so, if you’ve never participated, I highly recommend you check it out!

I’m a Municipal Liaison aka ML for the event which is just a fancy way of saying I’m a local volunteer in charge of organizing everything in my area for NaNoWriMo. While rewarding, it’s a lot of work being ML and I’ve been working steadily getting ready for the event for several months now and it will basically take over my life in November. (I am literally running four in-person events for NaNoWriMo this week alone, not to mention a class party for my 6 yo and Trick or Treating!)

This is all to say this is why posts on here have been so sparse and I’ve been so quiet on social media. It’s also why, though I’ve signed up to participate, I’ve got absolutely nothing prepared to write yet. I know what I would like to do, and that’s to use this month to finish several non-fiction books, so here’s hoping I get a chance to outline at least part of something before things get started!

But to make up for the long blog drought, I’ll be sharing something on the blog every single day from now November 16th! A lot of new content and a few “refreashed” older posts so stay tuned! I’ve also got a huge archive of NaNoWriMo posts I’ve written over the last decade-plus, most of which are organized in this NaNoWriMo Table of Contents.

Here’s to a month of literary abandon for everyone!