Happy November 1st! It’s the first day of NaNoWriMo! It stands for National Novel Writing Month, and if you have no idea what this is about, click on the image above and follow the link.

As some of you know, The Secret Life of Daydreams had its humble beginnings during NaNoWriMo last year. I still find it unbelievable, but I wrote 50,501 words in November of 2012, and won the bragging rights:

I’m giving it another go this year. Since I already started this story, I’m considered a NaNo “rebel”, but I will be only counting the words that I started today for the NaNo project.

According to the NaNo site, I have to write 1,667 words per day to keep on track. Some writers are able to sit down and write that much, and more, in one or two hours. I’m certainly not that prolific. So this year, I figured out another way to keep my daily goal. I divided the daily word count goal by 3, which gives me the number 556. This is a much more manageable word count for me. I can get three chunks of time, or shifts, during a 24 hour period, and write 556 words in each period, and keep the daily goal. I already started at midnight, and was actually able to go over a little bit on the word count of the first shift. I don’t know if I’ll be able to keep this goal every day for the month of November, but I’m going to worry about each day as it comes.

I know that 50,000 words seem daunting. I surprised myself last year that I was actually able to do it. I had never written fiction before, or even written that much—period. My writing experience was limited to university papers and a few poems in Portuguese and English. But I had that story crying to get out, and I had to give it a try.

Make a goal that works for you. Don’t pay attention to the NaNo word count goals, or your friends or Facebook who can write 3-5,000 words per day. That’s their problem. Let the intimidation aside, and work on something that feels right for you. Who knows? You might surprise yourself and write 50,000 words.