Thank you so much! I've been lurking for a while, so I know that you all might be interested in doing the NaNoWriMo... My writing circle here in Israel wrote me about it. It's taken me a year to come up with 115,000 words for my novel...I can't imagine doing 50,000 words in one month! Good on you if you can do it!
I did it last year for the first time. And I had never written that much for anything. I did not finish but I did make 30,000 in three weeks. That is the usefulness of NANO. Being forced to break pasted all they blocks and distractions and just get words on 'paper' in large quantities.
Jen dragged us all into it a few years back...at this point I've managed to finish three times and flunked out one. Gosh...doesn't seem like it's been that long!
But the first year, I'd never written anything longer than maybe 15,000 words, and I'd never even so much as committed myself to writing daily for a full month. I came out of it knowing I *could* write a real novel...but that I'd need to do a *lot* more writing to produce anything good. ;-)
But it was fun anyhow. And is every year. And we talk about it here in the Hobbit Hole every year until we drive the non-participants to distraction. Heh.