I’m not actually writing this today, as I’m taking a long weekend to welcome my husband home from his trip to Prague and to celebrate our fifteenth wedding anniversary. But my ghostly alter-ego is appearing, to point you toward a post that’s been getting a revival lately: The 6 Golden Rules of NaNoWriMo. And, from the year before last: Launching Headfirst into NaNoWriMo.

What makes NaNoWriMo the event that it is?

• Is it the time of year?

  Late—we’re all tired of the year by November, tired of the political and economic catastrophes that keep collapsing on our heads, tired of the ever-present, never-ending pressure of our jobs and regular daily routines. We’re looking forward to the holidays, and at the same time the angst of preparing for them is the perfect fuel for a cross-eyed, inexplicable blast out of our blessed minds.

• Is it having a goal?
  • A wordcount

    —and not the real worldcount for a modern salable novel either, but a cheat for today’s industry, a wordcount that harks back to an earlier time, a less restricted market, a less vicious competitive pool. A wordcount that reassures us that all those books we grew up on and have loved all our lives are perfectly good lengths for novels, no matter what anybody in the industry says now.

  • A time limit

    —which, as it happens, incorporates a hidden reward embedded in our calendar eons ago by those wacky Romans who made it up: November only has thirty days. So when you get to that one last day and realize you simply can’t go any further (this game has chewed up you and spit you out). . .you don’t have to. You can collapse right before the finish line, as we are all so tempted to do, and find yourself lying smack-dab flat across it. Hurrah!

• It is the fact that so many others are doing it too?

  We who spend a lot of time online live in a virtual world simultaneously far more crowded and far more isolated than anything the human animal could ever have evolved to expect. Millions of us are out here in both real and virtual time. And yet it’s so darn quiet.

  But once a year a time rolls around in which thousands band together in a single project built around this craft we love. And we can find each other. We know we can.

I try to post stuff for you guys every week throughout November on how to produce great work in only thirty days that’s also (most importantly) fun, but what I don’t usually mention is that I write a book myself every November, and I have for the past eight years. They’re children’s books for my son. I don’t do it for NaNoWriMo, though. (In fact, I think my November habit might older than NaNo. It’s certainly older than my awareness of NaNo.) I do it because I want to give my son a new book that will make him laugh really hard every year, and I always procrastinate until November. Also, this year I’m 32,000 words into a ghost story planned to come in around 36,000, which I expect to finish in December as well—that just kind of happened.

So while you’re reading and wondering, ‘Does this stuff really work? I mean—how would she know?’

Rest assured: yes, it does work.

I know because I keep doing it.