On All NaNo's Eve, the ghouls come out to play...

...and they keep muttering about word processing programs.

Call me the proud possessor of a Type A personality, but I haven't been able to stop watching the NaNoWriMo countdown clock all week. This is my first year attempting it, and I'm both excited and scared.

Which is odd, quite frankly. I'm a fairly productive writer. I consider 3500 words to be a good day. Anything under 2000 is a failure. 1667 should be a cakewalk, right? Then why the hell haven't I done this before?

Well, things have a way of piling up. The first time that I heard about this strange NaNoWriMo thing, I was a sophomore in college. I was taking a full course load on top of working a full time job, and November landed right smack in the middle of finals season. Not a chance. Not even if I slit open my veins and poured the Red Bull directly into them. Then I graduated college, got a job that actually paid all of my bills without requiring ninety hours a week. Whoo-hoo! Time to party! The past two years of my life, without going into too much detail, have done a great job of dismantling that plan. Maybe NaNoWriMo just wasn't destined to be in my future.

Long story short, I got mad. I got fed up with the person who sent my life running into that brick wall two years ago having control over me even though we're in different states and decided to do this rather than simply talking about it. Every writer runs into excuses not to write, I'm not enough of a special snowflake to escape being a…special snowflake. The third book in the series that I'm tweaking is also guaranteed to kick my rear end. Opening myself up to the specter of public mocking might just be the only way to get it done. And, okay, my competitive spirit is up.

So, gentle readers, this is my warning to you: I will be of dubious sanity for the next thirty days. However, if all goes according to plan, at the end I just might have a book.

It's about to get scary.