It's Shiny! It's New! It's October!

So yesterday was October 1st. And possibly the second best day when it comes to NaNoWriMo.

Before I get ahead of myself, let me backtrack.

NaNoWriMo - officially known as National Novel Writing Month - is, as their website puts it "30 days and nights of literary abandon". Which basically means a bunch of crazy people aged 13 to 50+ from around the world get together and cheer each other on as everyone attempts to write 50,000 words of a novel in November alone.

November 1, 12:00 AM - NaNoWriMo starts
November 30, 11:59 PM - NaNoWriMo ends

The Web site has a word counter so you can keep track of your progress towards 50k words. They also have forums to let everyone be able to get together and talk about everything related to NaNoWriMo. Throughout November, the staff behind NaNoWriMo (they work in the Office of Letters and Light) put together a series of pep talks from authors to cheer us on, create videos to make us laugh, promote their store so they can stay in business for the next year, and many more things.

It's a great event if you're a major writer.

So, if NaNoWriMo isn't until November, then what's so great about October 1st?

Well my friends, October 1st is when the frenzy kicks in as Dan, their tech master, cleans the site. This means he erases everything out of the forums from the previous NaNoWriMo, the frozen word counters are reset to zero, home regions (so people can know where you're from) are reset, the previous year is added to the list of possible years you could have participated (and won!) in NaNoWriMo, etc., so and so forth....

But the best thing is the first thin I mentioned. When the forums get cleaned out. New plot ideas are hashed, age groups are formed, people begin trading contact info and requesting each other as writing buddies....All in all, it's a bit like the month leading up to Christmas. Everyone on the site has been waiting with held breath for this one glorious month, and October is our prep month.

No writing is allowed until Novermber, so for now, we must plot, research, outline, research some more, plot, research more, plot, develop characters, plot, set up our November Survival Lists (everything we'll need to make it across the 50k word goal in November), plot, plot, plot....It's great fun, though. But not quite as fun as the actual writing part.

For now, I must part with you all. I am in the middle of researching what relationships were like for people in Joan of Arc's time for my NaNo 2010 novel. See you all in a bit to keep you updated on my progress!