Today is the ninth day of NaNoWriMo, and I'm 6,484 words behind. 


What? You don't know what NaNoWriMo is? Check out the website. They call it a competition, but really it's just a big online cheering group for writers--a bunch of writers encouraging each other to write. Specifically, to finish a short novel--50,000 words. All of them written during the month of November. 


I've "won" NaNoWriMo twice, which means that for two Novembers in a row (2007 and 2008) I wrote 50,000 words during the month. Actually, the book I'm revising now started out as my first NaNoWriMo novel (although the new version of it has morphed so much as to be utterly unrecognizable as its original version). But I wasn't revising either of those novels--I was writing first draft, and I knew it, and I was okay with it. I was willing to throw words on the page without thinking, without revising, without trying to make them good. I never hit the delete button. And that's a great way to finish a lot of words, but, well, I know I can do that now. I don't just want to write a lot of words. I want to write a good novel. 


But I do need to get something down on paper first, and even though this is technically a revision, I'm changing so much that I'm also rewriting from the beginning. So I'm going to try to NaNo it. I'm going to try to catch up. In any case, I'm going to try to meet high word counts every day in November--and in December too, until this thing is done. 


If nothing else, I promised my sister I'd give her this manuscript as a Christmas present!