For those of you who don't know, NaNoWriMo stands for national novel writing month. Every year in the month of November a bunch of crazy people (I mean writers) write a whole novel in 30 days or at least the first 50,000 words of one. It's an intense, stressful and also fun thing to do.

Last year I decided to try it for the first time. I've known about NaNoWriMo for a while because of some Youtubers I watched. I never thought I'd be able to do it. I did attempt my own modified version, where I just made an attempt to write every day on my own. That failed quickly.

Last year was when I decided to do it for real, I would go for the 50,000 words. But instead of writing an original novel I wrote a fan fiction based off of the television show "Once Upon a Time" (and yes, fan fiction is allowed for NaNoWriMo). I made an account on the NaNoWriMo website that helped me keep track of my progress throughout the month. It not only told me how many more words I had to go but also calculated when I would finish and had a goal for the day I would need to hit in order to finish on time.

By some miracle I did it. How you may ask. The answer is fierce determination, a strong will, passion, avoiding all social interactions, gallons of caffeine and sacrificing sleep. Btw, I'm still working on my fan fiction, it's a long ongoing project.

So what do I do this year? Participate again of course, like the insane person I am. But instead of writing a fan fiction this time, I'm writing an original novel. It's a different experience than what I had last year.

One of the biggest challenges is that the workload for me has increased since last year. I'm taking four English classes which involve a lot of reading and writing. Plus I'm doing Odyssey and a creative writing class. Basically, I'm already writing a lot of words.

The other challenge is literally creating the whole novel, the plot, the characters, the story, everything! When I wrote the fan fiction, I just created a few of my own characters that I wove into the world that already existed in the TV show. The rules of the world and the overarching plot were already pre-established for me to work with. All I had to do was create my own characters' backstories and weave them in a way that made sense. With this project, I'm creating everything from scratch. It's challenging, exciting, but also really hard.

I'm not the type of person who can plan a story out very well. Especially this one because it's more about the characters and doesn't have much of a plot.

NaNoWriMo is really challenging, very rewarding in the end. When I hit the 50,000 words last year I basically had bragging rights. But it's also amazing because it was more words than I had ever written in one month in my whole life, and it gave me better confidence that I can fulfill my dreams of being an author. I'm still in the middle of doing NaNoWriMo this year. I don't know if I'll hit 50,000 words again this year, but it'll still be more words than most people will write in a whole year.