Commonly referred to as "National Novel Writing Month" or "NaNoWriMo" for short. I think it's pronounced "nan-oh-ree-mo" At least that's how I've always pronounced it.
Anywho, I haven't touched NaNoWriMo for like, a good six years. I follow it and cheer those on who tackle the challenge every single November. But in the past few years it just hasn't been on my radar. For those who don't know; the goal behind National Novel Writing Month (November), is to allow a social media type platform for writers to challenge themselves into writing at least 50,000 words in a month.
In college, this was viewed as a challenge by not only my classmates, but my professors too. It was one of those "proud nod" moments if you succeeded. The first one I did was for my first draft of book 2, which I'm pretty sure sat somewhere squarely around 90,000 words. And, yes, by some miracle, I did happen to spit book 2's first draft out in a little over a month. It wasn't a great book. It was a book, but nothing of notoriety or even passing mention. I'd managed to bang a story against a keyboard and get it onto paper, but it isn't the same story I just penned a massive rewrite on last year.
I logged onto my profile for NaNoWriMo because I was hoping they'd have a banner or something for me to put here. Instead I somehow found myself plopping in my current project and placing it in the "write this in a month" category and then slapped the 6,000 words I wrote tonight into the calculator. Now, in theory, no, I won't be adding another 50,000 words to the last several chapters of book 3. But, well, I've surprised myself before. I hope I'm not adding that hefty of a word count to the book, but I'm also not tracking it so, who knows.
So I guess now I have an arbitrary thing on the interwebs that shows I'm working on book 3, and I won't be disappointed if I somehow forget about NaNoWriMo and updating my word count. So long as I finish book 3 sometime soon, I'm going to be happy with my progress. My short term goal is to get at least book 4 written by the end of the year, with the hope to have book 5 written by the time spring rolls around. That way, maybe - just maybe - I can start to look into publishing.
Maybe.