Less than 3 weeks to go. I've been excited for November for a long time, and while I'm glad it's really really close now, I'm also fairly nervous. I haven't done NaNo since 2006, so I think it will probably take a while to get back into the swing of things. Plus, I haven't written seriously in a long time. I'm already predicting that this year may be somewhat of a challenge. Between working 40 hours a week and being a full-time single mom, I barely have time to shower, let alone five minutes of free time. So I'm having a hard time picturing how 50,000 words will be created in the midst of my hectic life. But I think I work best under pressure, when all of life's responsibilities are crammed into a small, time-crunched space, so I'm hoping that with a little less sleep (the precious few hours I steal each night), a lot more coffee (and lattes and espresso and caffeine IVs if need be), and just a bit of creative multi-tasking (i.e. hiding my novel behind Meditech at work all day and taking extra long lunches)... and I think it can get done.

Speaking of the soon-to-be-born novel, I'm actually going the non-fiction route again. When I did NaNo three years ago, I wrote a condensed memoir of my naive 20 years of life. I wrote it mainly because I had to write my autobiography for class, so this gave me an easy way to reach te 50-page minimum for the assignment. But I also wrote it because it was, in a sense, therapeutic. At the time I was about to leave the life I had known (Ithaca) and reimmerse myself in the only home I had ever known (Reading, MA). I was scared and unprepared and needed a way to work out my emotions by creating something familiar and safe. So, my abridged memoir, "20 Good Years" was born.

Fast forward 3 years. The 20 good years I had lived morphed into an indistinguishable, at times dark, and foreign existence that changed everything I knew and everything I will become. I'm sorry if that sounds a little dramatic, but it's a fair characterization of the past few years. Things are finally falling into place, after much turmoil, and I really would like to revisit my life post-Ithaca to now for the same therapeutic reason as before. Writing is how I make sense of the world. It's how I process my emotions and figure out what everything means.

So I'm looking forward to this November. I can't promise there will be all-night write-a-thons filled with Taco Bell runs, skirts and leggings, and delirious 5am artwork (man, that night was fun), but there will nevertheless be a 50,0o0 memoir at the end of the month. And that's a promise.