I'm doing it this year too, partially because I write so much about books on Ferretbrain. It's not so much that I feel that I have to have some experience of writing to slam crappy authors like Cecilia Dart-Thornton, any more than I have to work in a kitchen for years before I can complain about being served poo on a stick for lunch - it's just that having seen so many ways people do it wrong, I'm wondering whether I can actually do it right, or whether I'll just produce something which is so keen to avoid my particular bugbears it makes all kinds of other mistakes in the bargain.

Oh, that said I won't actually be registering for it, for the following reasons:
- I'm not interested in comparing my lamentable progress with other people's, or reading excerpts from complete strangers' works in progress.
- I don't want to feel obliged to stop once the month is over, and I have no interest in being a "winner". If what I've written is any good, I want to be able to spend more time polishing it and submitting it to an actual publisher; if it's crap, I'm not going to broadcast it all over the internet.
- Having at least three of my RL friends (at the last count) participating is all the community I need.

Disregard that, I misunderstood what they meant when they talked about verifying the word count - I thought they expected you to upload the unscrambled text of the novel. Which wouldn't be something I'd ever want to do, ever.

If you do decide to do NaNo, I strongly recommend signing up officially. The whole point of NaNo is that the clear, concrete challenge of writing 50,000 words in a month, and making the number public, will encourage you to actually get writing instead of prevaricating. Essentially it's about providing a metric for success which *isn't* "getting published".

Um. That wasn't what I meant to say. I just hit the button by accident. Not that I don't want you to have fun. Do have fun.

What I wanted to say was that it took me the longest time to call myself a writer, even though it's what I do that brings in the biggest bucks. (Not that those bucks could be called big by any stretch of the imagination.)

But I felt embarrassed and unentitled to the... um... title. Precisely because a writer is someone like Dickens or Hemingway or Steinbeck, who write IMPORTANT BOOKS and get written about by critics. And collect royalties.

Whereas I am merely someone with a talent for typing quickly and stringing words together in a coherent fashion. And, although there are actual books with my name on them that are available at Amazon.com, they were all written for hire and I'll never see another penny from them.

Also, since I'm freelance, writing seems like something that could disappear at any moment. It often does.

So, it was with a surprised thrill that I finally once answered when someone asked what I did, that I replied, "I'm a writer."

I have to admit that part of the reason I want to do NaNo is on the off chance that I'll end up with something like The Eye Of Argon, and gain infamy that way ;-)

I've signed up to the official site, because I agree it's useful to make the numbers public, but I've turned off everything else because, like Arthur, I think the fact that I have real-life friends participating is sufficient community for me.

(I'm also amused that the canonical abbreviation is 'NaNo' when 'WriMo' makes so much more sense in most contexts...)

(I am dithering on the borders of Nano ... I may join you insanity, or I may not. I'm not sure I'll have time.)

But I felt embarrassed and unentitled to the... um... title.

Fascinating, isn't it, that 'writer' is a title in a way that administrator or plumber just isn't. I suppose it's because it brushes up against ideas of authorship and authors and, oh gosh, then it's Foucault all the way to insanity and back :)

FWIW, I am on the actual site, partly because my misconceptions as to how you submit novels for word counting have been sorted, partly because enough of our circle are on there that it's worth it to keep tabs on each other. :)

I agree that the big deal is having a deadline and a word count, and I suppose having something publicly accessible which shows your wordcount is a good spur (especially if you are writing alongside people whose opinions you respect ;) ).

I also think that it's past time we started referring to the thing as WoNoWriMo, because talking about your "nano project" implies you are fiddling with nanotechnology or iPods.

I think Montavilla and I have something in common here. I find I keep pushing my definition of "writer" or "published writer" forever onward so I never am one, even though I have been published and the things I have published have been in book form.

In my more sarcastic moments, I have noted that (at least up to a point) there is frequently an inverse correlation between a person's willingness to self-define as a writer, and the amount of actual writing they do.