Forget the cold winds and gray skies; nothing quite says November like the frantic scrambling of thousands of amateur (and maybe a few professional) writers across the globe as they participate in terrifying challenge of National Novel Writing Month.

Never heard of it? Here’s all you need to know: crazy people (like me) spend from midnight on Nov. 1 to midnight on Nov. 31 trying to write a 175-page novel. That’s 50,000 words in one month, averaging at about 1,666 words a day. There’s no prize if you win except the satisfaction that your tears, sweat and maybe a little bit of blood went into producing those 50,000 words.

The beauty of NaNoWriMo is that the writing doesn’t have to be good; it just has to be fast. The idea behind NaNoWriMo is get writers writing without worrying about little things that bog them like editing or spelling mistakes – editing is what December is for, after all. Often times a writer gets so caught up in trying to make every single word perfect that they forget to focus on getting their story out, and it takes them ages to keep on writing.

For some, writing the 50,000 words is a piece of cake – I’ve already seen people on the NaNoWriMo Forums that have 31,000 words and it’s not even the end of day three yet! But for others, even hitting that daily word count goal is like pulling teeth. I’m somewhere in the middle. I currently have 3,385 words, and I’ll need 5,000 by the end of the day to make the daily word goal. Getting the word count usually isn’t hard for me, but getting my inner editor to shut up so I can write new words instead editing the last thousand or so is another challenge completely.

This will be my second year participating for NaNoWriMo. I participated last year, and got about 23,000 words before I decided I hated my story and I quit. I’m hoping to do a little better or at least cross the finish line this year. One of my goals in life is to complete NaNoWriMo at least once because it’s such an interesting challenge.

So if you haven’t signed up this year, it’s not too late to do so! Head on over to NaNoWriMo.org and join in the insanity!