Declaration: 25,000 (New) Words by November 30

So for those of you that don't know, it's National Novel Writing Month (or NaNoWriMo) beginning today. In past posts I've been feeling left out of these creative speedwriting events, but yesterday I made a command decision--I'm going to ride the wave of enthusiasm and slight insanity of NaNoWriMo, but in my own way.

No, I'm not going to plow out 50,000 words of novel draft by the end of the month, as NaNoWriMo participants will. My goal is more in keeping with the spirit of this blog, whose purpose is to knock down the partitions between the parts of my writing selves.

And so (drum roll please) I'm going to write 25,000 new words of significant writing (for the most part, blog entries don't count) by November 30. This averages out to, excluding Sundays and starting last night, an average of 1000 new words per day. This writing may be academic or creative in nature. It can be in any combination of projects. In fact, the work can involve revision--10 pages of revised text will substitute per 1000 words of my total.

The rule is only that it must not primarily be for my own use, but something that's intended to be sent out into the world for evaluation--either to be graded by my professors or for publication of some kind.

See, I'm a grad student, and I have lots of other writing responsibilities I would feel terrible about abdicating if I tried to spend a month doing NaNoWriMo with only creative work. This way I should make tons of progress on my academic writing (and yes, journals that I have to hand in for my archives class count) and, because of that, get some work done in the creative realm as well.

Oh, and query letters and cover letters count as well--I'll be counting up the number of items I actually submit places as well. I'm excited about using this month not only to produce, but also to focus on revising as many items as possible and getting 'em out there...

So hey, those of you out there doing NaNoWriMo, I'm with you guys. And those of you who don't feel you have a novel in you but want to ride the writing excitement with me, please feel free to join me in NaWriMo, using whatever rules you feel you can adhere to reasonably.

Of course, this said, my first night was unproductive. Today, however, I'm planning to write a good portion of a conference paper due on Monday, and revise another for the same deadline, and write a creative non-fic essay also due on Monday, so that will get me significantly ahead in word count.

So off into the intrepid adventure of plowing out the pages of text...I'm quite excited about it, actually...check out this blog's side bar for my word count and submission stats.