If you hurry you can still sign up to participate in National Novel Writing Month. Over the 30 days of November you churn out a 50,000 word novel (roughly 175 pages) with the help and support of all the other maniacs who are trying to achieve the same goal. There are forums and local meetups and all sorts of shenanigans to either keep you on track or give you some fun things to procrastinate with.

I was tempted, but I found out about it just a bit too late. I’m not willing to dive in at this point, but don’t let that stop you. I did a little experiment with Microsoft Word… if you start a document and adjust the font to Courier New, set the line spacing to double, and add a half inch indent to the paragraphs, you’d need to write about two and a half pages a day to make the goal. Doesn’t seem like that much, at least if you have an idea for what you want to write. Word also had a word counting feature, and a toolbar item you can turn on to easily check your word count at any time. I hear this is how Stephen King got started, so it’s probably worth doing