Oh the anxiety that would give me

Also, I'm too slow. most automated things do not like my rhythm at all.

I think I am going to try to do NaNoWriMo this year. At least try to write a bunch of words. I've got a project just barely started and what it needs is a shitty first draft, so why not

I promised I'd do NaNoWriMo this year, because I'm unemployed and what else have I got to do, but it's already Nov 2 and I haven't even started. I have 6 hours to write 3200 words.

Piece of cake, right?

The best way to do NaNo, especially if you haven't done it in a while, is just to make a commitment to write every day (if you can!) and see what you have at the end of the month.

I feel like to actually produce even a very rough first draft of a novel in a month, you have to do a lot of preplanning (prewriting, I guess) in terms of plot and character. Or that could just be me!

I should actually try the "write every day" thing this month just to finish the proposal I've been working on for umpty million years. That would be a good thing.

That makes sense, Amy. I did set the word count goal just to encourage me to push myself, but I'm not going to be too disappointed if I don't hit it as long as I write something.

I've been thinking about these characters for a long time and if I can get a fair amount of it out of my head and onto the page I'll be happy, really.

Go, Zen, churn out some words!

One thing a lot of writers do on Twitter is word sprints. You all start at the same time and write for a set number of minutes, as much as you can. If anyone is interested, we could do that here, too.

I'm interested.

It's fun -- it's knowing everyone is writing together and coming back when time's up to compare word counts and whatever.

I used to do that with some Star Trek friends. We had a chat room and we'd set a timer for 10-15 minutes or whatever and then come back to share/critique if wanted. It was fun. So many different stories and styles of writing.