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I hadn't heard of this "Nanowrimo" till I got a spam e-mail trying to sell me a program that would write for me. (How lame is that?) While I was completely uninterested in the product the spam was trying to sell, the contest they mentioned sounded pretty cool. So I checked it out, and I'm now signed up!

On November 1st, you start writing, and then come hell or high water, you write a novel of at least 50,000 words by midnight, November 30. The interesting thing about the contest, (or race,) is that it's a matter of quantity rather than quality. As they put it on their site...

"Valuing enthusiasm and perseverance over painstaking craft, NaNoWriMo is a novel-writing program for everyone who has thought fleetingly about writing a novel but has been scared away by the time and effort involved.

Because of the limited writing window, the ONLY thing that matters in NaNoWriMo is output. It's all about quantity, not quality. The kamikaze approach forces you to lower your expectations, take risks, and write on the fly.

Make no mistake: You will be writing a lot of crap. And that's a good thing. By forcing yourself to write so intensely, you are giving yourself permission to make mistakes. To forgo the endless tweaking and editing and just create. To build without tearing down."

So yeah. I'm gonna go for it, and see what I come up with! Who knows, maybe I'll actually FINISH a story for once... (I have a mountain of uncompleted stories @_@) As a part of the rules, you can only start writing it on November 1st, so no stories that you've half written already. I'm thinking about trying to write a mystery novel... it's gonna be terrible. XD