National Novel Writing Month. Anybody else doing it?

It is acutely embarrassing to be aware of oneself as an alt weekly editor with novelistic ambitions, much less talk about it in public, but here goes: Last November I think I wrote about 15,000 words (you have to write 50k to "win") and then didn't write a lick of fiction for the rest of the year. This year's goals are to write more words than that, and to do a better job sustainably integrating writing-for-fun into my daily routines.

My favorite part of NaNoWriMo last year was receiving motivational emails from authors—like Aimee Bender and John Green—about their own writing processes. I also surprisingly dug the communal aspect of it: the competition and motivation of friends who were also playing along. To that end, the NaNoWriMo site has a social networking component that I haven't remotely figured out how to use yet; there's also a Portland Facebook group that seems to be largely populated by cheery middle-aged ladies.

Happy writing, everybody.