What other month of the year gives you Movember – an excuse to not shave and look like a 70s porn star for 30 days without being ridiculed by your peers… ok, so there’s a lot of ridicule, but as long your peers are joining in the fun, you are not going to be the sole focus of the hilarity.

As if that wasn’t insane enough for you, add a squeeze of NaNoWriMo into the cocktail of insanity. There is one goal – write a 50,000 word novel in 30 days.

NaNoWriMo is celebrating its 10th birthday this year. It started in 1999, with only 21 participants so I’m really a late comer to the fun – 2007 was my first year. And I’d say I did pretty well. I crossed the 50,000 word mark on November 25, but wasn’t quite finished, so managed to plug on to 60,000 by November 30.

It is a long, tough month, trying to crank out that many words in a somewhat coherent and structured form, all while still holding down my day job. There were numerous social occasions that I bailed on because I needed every minute possible to make sure I stuck to at least my quote of 1,666 words per day. It taught me to write where I could. I’d plan and structure what I was writing on the tram on the way to and from work, and I’d take my laptop into a coffeeshop at lunch times – even just doing 100 words here or there during the day helped add to the total. It was exhausting, but in a thrilling, maniacal laughing sort of way.

You would wonder why I would choose to put myself through all that again. I’m still wondering that too. But there’s something so brilliantly stupid about the idea that I can’t resist. November 2007 was the most productive month of writing I’ve ever experienced. The rest of the year I tend to be a little incredibly slack and undisciplined.

And for those of you that don’t have time or inclination to write a novel, there’s always NaBloPoMo – National Blog Posting Month – where the aim is to write a blog post every day for a month for prizes.