Good luck to everyone participating in National Novel Writing Month! May it be a fun and fruitful 30 days. Writing 50,000 words in a month is quite an insane undertaking, but it's a wonderful kind of insanity. NaNoWriMo has given me so much (including a book deal! I wrote the first draft of my forthcoming novel, Self Storage, during NaNoWriMo in 2003. The NaNo FAQ page says I wrote it in 2004, but that's okay. That's the year I wrote the draft that ended up selling. At the end of that first November, it definitely wasn't in sellable condition!) You can read more about my NaNo experiences in Chris Baty's great book, No Plot? No Problem! A Low-Stress, High-Velocity Guide to Writing a Novel in 30 Days.

I'm not signing up for NaNoWriMo this year because I will be deep in Self Storage revisions--my editor's notes should arrive any day now. I can't wait to dive back into the story! In the meanwhile, I'm trying to write as much of my new novel as possible, but I don't think I can commit to 50,000 words this month and still keep all the hair on my head.