Crazy Things

Okay, there are a lot of crazy things you do in your life.

Some are forced on you, like when I was a child and had to wait for the school bus in subzero temperatures--and the wind was blowing--and the reward was six hours of school. There was no choice involved.

Wait. Well, yeah, actually there was one: walk all the way (like our parents did, going uphill both ways), but I won't go there.

Instead I want to ponder the other crazy things, the voluntary ones, that on some wild hair we choose to do to ourselves. Often, we look at it in advance and think: Hey, that looks like fun. Where do I sign up?

And then reality hits and we're neck deep in a quagmire of our own making. I've done that a few times. One time in particular was in high school, when I signed up for the Junior Miss Pageant.

I know. Now THAT was crazy. It didn't take long to realize it was SO not me. But I don't like quitting and I stuck it out. I knew I stunk, but still, when they were announcing the winners, I was silently praying I wouldn't win anything because I just wanted it to stop and go away. (Just in case any of you are kind enough to wonder, I didn't win anything. It did go away. And thanks for wondering.  : )

So that brings us to now.

I don't know if you've heard of NaNo (short for NaNoWriMo or National Novel Writing Month), but it's an online website where you can sign up to write a 50,000 word novel in one month. To do that, you either write 1,666 words a day, every day for the month of November, or you can take Sundays off and write 1,923 words a day.

The insane part of it is that people all over the world do this. Voluntarily. On purpose. And each day you input your words and it counts them and tracks it for you. They even have this cool diagram. A stats page tells you how many words you wrote that day, how many you have left, and how your region of the world is doing.

It's kind of cool. I joined the crazy people. My life, being somewhat full, demanded that there weren't enough hours in the day. So I laughed in the face of time (and sleep) and got up super early. For a month. I wrote at least 1,923 words a day. A lot of them stunk. Bad.

But I learned something. It was really FUN! Other than Sundays, I didn't miss a day. I now have a 50,198 word completed novel, which is in need of many, many edits.

I also learned how good it is to sleep in to a decent hour.

If any of you want to join the crazy people next year, here's the link:

http://www.nanowrimo.org/

And when you reach your goal, you can get a cool winner's badge to post on your blog, or to frame and hang in your living room, or to have embossed in gold, lit up with spotlights and placed on top of the Empire State Building.

So I'm not going to waste another minute. Here's the badge. And it was SO worth it!

So what's a crazy thing you've chosen to do?