National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) is a competition, website (NaNoWriMo.org), and month used to bring a new approach to novel writing. Instead of quality, time, or craft the idea of the ‘program’ is quantity, “It’s basically brain-vomit everywhere!”  Victoria Baker, senior, likes to say.

   The goal for NaNoWriMo is a word count… 50,000 words, actually. Once you’ve passed that daunting mark—you’ve won. That’s it! It’s that easy! The website opens to submissions Nov. 1, and it ends Nov. 30 at midnight.

   Until Nov. 25 you can’t upload a final submission, but you are able to copy/paste your current copy into their word counter so you know where you stand. NaNoWriMo doesn’t have any cash prizes, but if you reach the 50K mark they’ll send you a manuscript of your story, something you could easily take to a publisher.

   NaNoWriMo.org has forums and site links to help writers in all sorts of predicaments. They update the site daily with new information and interesting new books, among other things. Also to help the struggling writers of the internet NaNoWriMo has nifty little charts to help you figure out where you need to be, where you actually are, and where you’re going to want to be in a few days.

  Unfortunately, if you’re only finding out about NaNoWriMo from this article, you’ve already lost time! You now only have eighteen days to write 50,000 words, and if you’re starting from scratch you’d have to write 2,800 words per day to get there.

                So if you’ve ever wanted to write a novel with any amount of seriousness, get off of facebook, your IM client, open Word, and get to it. Luckily for you, nobody ever said it had to make sense to anyone but you.