This is National Novel Writing Month.

I like to put in a plug for it every year, but at over 90,000 participants (it started in 1999 with around 25 people), maybe that’s the last thing they need. That, at least, is how I’m justifying not mentioning it until past the middle of the month.

If you’re interested, you can still sign up but you might consider just lurking around the highly entertaining forums to get your feet wet before jumping in next year. On the other hand, if you need inspiration and a fast approaching deadline, go for it!

In case you don’t know, the idea is to write 50,000 words of a brand new novel in the month of November.

My first year was 2002 which makes this—doing fast math—my sixth nano year. I have considered not doing it some years, but I think I’m past that. This year even with absolutely no time to plan, there was no question that I’d be back, doing my very best to come up with another story worthy of at least 30 days of my life.

I love it because doing NaNoWriMo has taught me, more than any other class or teacher or mentor ever did, how to write a novel. It taught me how to write through the dry periods, the uninspired days, the drivel that sometimes comes out when we sit down to make up a story. It showed me the vast amount of words you have to put down before finding the right ones in the right order. It not only taught me, but also it illustrated for me, the reasons behind turning off your internal censor and suppressing at every opportunity the doubts that are always there.

A daily word count goal (sometimes even an hourly one!) goes a very long way indeed toward overcoming the mechanical (I don’t have any good ideas), emotional (I am not good enough) and practical (no time!) reasons most people never write a novel.

If writing a novel isn’t something you aspire to here’s another option. This year I’ve joined a very active social networking group called NaBloPoMo that promotes blogging everyday in the month of November (reason No. 2 why this little site o’ mine has received less attention from me than usual). I’ve been blogging most days about my NaNoWriMo writing process, as I’ve been going through it, as well as posting a few tips along the way. You can see these posts in the NaNoWriMo category on my blog. As well, I’m going to be posting the Graphic Reminders I’ve done, here on The PCQ.

I haven’t been totally neglecting The PCQ, however. There’s work-in-progress to have a new social networking branch of The PCQ. This will be a place where you can easily post and share your own works of art or writing, start your own discussions and groups on whatever kind of creativity you’re into, and decorate your own profile page with whatever you like! Hopefully an email will be going out to all registered members soon, inviting you to see it (but I have to get through November first!). Either way, look for a link to it on The PCQ home page and please do click over and see what it’s all about.