it’s that time of year again. when the trees look like they’re starting to fail, dropping their leaves with one last burst of color. when christmas decorations appear at the store the morning of halloween. when tens of thousands of writers take to their word counts and calculators and avoid contractions at all costs. national novel writing month, my friends.

30 days, 50,000 words. that’s a rather awkward 1666.66666666666666667 words a day if you aim to balance it out across the entire month.

six years ago i was temping full-time as a faculty assistant at harvard business school. the office was a little cave right off the central atrium of the building, so it was both incredibly dark and intermittently cacophonous when the atrium was full of students. but as a temp job, the work was also intermittent. i often had afternoons to wile and so it was lucky when several friends and i took the nanowrimo oath in the name of entirely unedited fiction. (editing is not advised unless you are an adder more than a subtractor.)

you’ll never see any part of that novel of mine anywhere, for the rest of your life. i’m certain you’d find the original file virtually untouched if you looked, but who knows which cd-r it lives on now. perhaps the last modified date is sometime in early 2002.

strangely part of my story involved a cross-country roadtrip (only somewhat obvious fodder for a novel), an experience i didn’t actually experience myself until the summer of 2002. i think i missed the “write about what you know” memo.

all this is to say that i saw a link to nanowrimo, thought about the writing i’ve been struggling to work on over the last few months, and found myself creating a username.

the foreshadowing of regret? i may end up wishing i’d signed up for nablopomo instead.