Halloween is over and November has begun, and you know what that means! It’s Christmas!

Unfortunately, not yet. You might have to get your calendar checked because there’s an entire month between the two holidays. So put your giant inflatable Santa away (lookin’ at you, Mom).

In the meantime, maybe check in on your writer friends. They’ve been a bit strange lately? A bit stressed? Might not have heard from them in a while?

Worry not. They’re just going through the joys of NaNoWriMo.

What’s NaNoWriMo?

I’m glad you asked. NaNoWriMo is the month-long torture fest that is National Novel Writing Month. For the entire month of November writers of all kind will spend every second of their life writing. And writing. And writing. Such is the life.

From November 1st to November 30th, writers will be working on their manuscript, sharing their ideas online, and trying to get to that harrowing word count of 50,000 words. Yup. 50,000 words in 30 days. It’s like “Around the World in 80 Days”, but instead of “around the world” it’s “I haven’t left my desk” and instead of 80 days you only get 30.

How hard could that be? Well, if you work at a steady pace, that’s only 1,667 words per day. But if you’re a procrastinator, or if words don’t come to you easily, it get’s harder. Say you start on November 10th, now you have to write 2,500 words each day. By November 20th, you’d have to crank out 5,000 a day to reach your goal.

It may not sound that hard if you chop it up into swallowable numbers. But the biggest issue with NaNoWriMo is the dreaded writer’s block (dun dun dun)! Once you’re in the middle of the month, the excitement has worn off, you’ve written all of your ideas down, and you have no idea how to continue. That’s when NaNo gets you. With each passing day, you can’t figure out how to continue the story and you consider just killing all the characters off so it can be done already. But you have to reach that 50,000-word count. So you make it a very slow death scene. On repeat. Lemony Snicket déjà vu style.

Sometimes writers can get prizes for completing their NaNoWriMo manuscript. But many writers just do it to test themselves, have fun, improve, and, of course, write!

Now, if you don’t mind, I have 49,584 more words to write! I’ll see you in December!