NaNoWriMo :: NaNoWriMo Blog

NaNoWriMo will always be one of the highlights of my year. I've been doing it for four years now... almost a veteran!

I think one of the best taglines for the experience is what you wrote in the email I just received, linked to the blog post I'm replying to now – "exploring an attractive, improbable dream."

We wouldn't do this if we didn't think it was impossible. NaNo gives people hope, returns dreams to dreamers, and removes platforms to make everything seem achievable. If you can at least START, you can finish, especially if you're a normally productive adult individual in whatever profession.

This is person. This is sometimes private, sometimes public, sometimes impossible and exacerbating and horrifying, but ultimately fulfilling. I will always love NaNoWriMo for the fact that it can bring all these people – all these goals, all these private desires, and in the end, all these accomplishments – together in one place.

We might not have dared otherwise, so thank you, Chris Baty, and thank to what has become the NaNoWriMo team, annually providing for us. Thanks for what you're going to do with our donations. Thanks for supporting creativity in the world. Thank you for taking the time to inspire us all with pep talks, getting others to write those pep talks as well, and ultimately, for writing alongside us.

I appreciate it, and I'll never forget a single year that I've endeavoured to set out and complete the NaNoWriMo goal.

The numbers are interesting, sure, but the feeling of it, the desperate lunge toward that final hurdle – that's why most of us sign on again and again to complete this challenge and prove to ourselves that we are capable of doing something extraordinary. We can achieve a dream outside our dreary worklives or whatever we're up to. So the wordcount matters. So the whole world, WRITING, matters –

But we're all still here, still working, still winning or coming so close and smiling because we finally had this courage.

So finally, all I can say is... thank you very much. Thank you.

Here's to more productivity and "wins" in the future!