So last night, I "won" National Novel Writing Month, which is to say that I passed the fifty thousand word mark. This is my fifth time winning at Nanowrimo, and it's actually the first time that I'm nowhere near done with my novel—I think I'm barely halfway through the goddamned thing.

I think it's fair to say that I wouldn't have this job if it weren't for Nanowrimo. The first year I did it, I Iearned the single most important rule that any writer can learn: You've gotta show up, put your butt in the seat, and actually type the fucking words. The deadline is more important than getting all the words exactly right, and you can fix everything later, in edits.

Seattle is actually the three-year worldwide champion region for producing the most words in Nanowrimo, and we're barely ahead this year:

(Take that, Holland!)

I know several Slog commenters are doing Nanowrimo, too. And I wish them a lot of luck this weekend, and I hope they finish, but if they don't, they should still be happy about what they've accomplished. I know some commenters (Fnarf!) have poked fun at the idea of producing 1,667 awful words every day for a month and calling it a novel, but here's the thing: nobody in their right mind would publish what they've written without a lot of work. But producing this huge sheaf of papers with your writing on it—something you can hold way up in the air and then drop and hear it hit the ground with a completely satisfying THWACK!—is actually accomplishing something. And it's really a lot of fun. Everything after the actual writing? That's gravy. Good work, people. See you in April for Script Frenzy.