It’s November already and that means it’s time for NaNoWriMo.

For those of you who aren’t familiar with the concept, NaNoWriMo is the National Novel Writing Month. Across the world, hundreds of thousands of writers are furiously scribbling away, trying to write a 50,000+ word novel by November 30th. That’s a lot of words in not a lot of time.

For me personally, that means an average of four hours of writing a day for 30 days. If I managed to remove distractions like Google+, Twitter and Facebook then I might be able to get that down to three hours a day but even then, that’s a big commitment when you’re holding down a day job and training for a half marathon. Despite the challenge, thousands of people manage to finish their novels every year. Me, I’ll stick to a more modest goal – and fail miserably*. Maybe next year I’ll find a way to pick up the pace enough to join the fun.

In the meantime, I’ll wish everyone taking part in NaNoWriMo luck, and keep my eye out for the next NaNoWriMo success story.

If you want to find out more – and it’s never too late to join in (okay, maybe not never, but you know what I mean) – you can find more information on the official website and there’s a nice article on the benefits of writing daily on LifeHacker. If you’re on Twitter, follow #nanowrimo for some insight into who’s writing what and how they’re doing.

* That’s my way of saying I didn’t do any writing yesterday although I blame the technical difficulties with the website for at least some of my failure.