It's NaNoWriMo Time Again!

National Novel Writing Month

Bet you're wondering what the acronym stands for. Well, here it is - National Novel Writing Month. And what month is National Novel Writing Month? Why it's November of course. It has been the same month every year since it's inception in 1999. Actually that's not true. The first year it was held in July with only 21 participants including its creator Chris Baty from the San Francisco Bay Area.

Year two, a friend of Chris' offered to built an actual NaNoWriMo site for free. The grand event was then moved to the month of November. This time, 140 people participated, most of who lived outside of the Bay Area, including some from Canada and places even further. NaNoWriMo had become international already!

Besides making improvements to better the official site, Chris created a NaNoWriMo Yahoo club, so that all the participants from all the far-flung areas could get to know each other. Theoretically, the group was working great ... until ... the members started asking questions about rules. Then Chris so graciously replied, "Rules? Who had time for namby-pamby rules? A literary revolution was afoot here, people! Write first! Ask questions later! A novel-writing tornado was ripping through our very heartlands! When a tornado is approaching, do you waste time pondering what rules may govern its mighty winds?" (He has such a way with words, doesn't he?)

After much care thought (in a short amount of time, about twenty minutes mind you) the rules were established. Write a 50,000-word novel from scratch by oneself (no co-authoring) in one months time - November 1st - November 30th was the first major criteria of this writing event of great magnitude. Then, participants are required to email their novel into Headquarters by midnight, Pacific Time, at the end of the month for word-count verification purposes. If this was not done, disqualification was the outcome.
Everything went well and things seemed enormously promising for the following year.