NaNo and NaBlo

I’ve been playing around with my sidebar lately. You may have noticed a couple of odd “badges” appearing there. On is NaNoWriMo and the other is NaBloPoMo. Unless you’ve encountered them before, you probably have no idea what’s going on.

So I’ll explain.

Every November the writing community gears up for one of our biggest challenges – to write an entire novel in a month. Whether you write Romance, or Science Fiction, or great literature you can participate. You don’t have to be professional, published, or anything, except willing to take up the challenge.

I live by challenges. They keep me focused and happy. Back in 2000, right after I completed my first.. um… completed novel, (this doesn’t count the ones I tried but could never finish) I heard that Nora Roberts averaged a new book every two weeks. I decided to see for myself if that was even possible.

In the course of four weeks I cranked out two books. They were very short, but they had the requisite beginning, middle, end, and character development, and were too long to be considered novellas. I went on to write a lot of other books as well, but never officially took up the NaNo challenge.

So I know I can do this. Or rather, I think I can do it. But just to make it interesting, I’m going to be taking on another challenge at the same time.

National Blog Posting Month is the bloggers response to NaNo. Instead of writing a book, we are challenged to put up a new blog post each day.

So for the month of November I am committed to both writing an entire book (minimum of 50,000 words) and putting up a post every day. Yeah, knowing me I’ll do double the number of posts. This doesn’t count the couple times a month I post over at Romance Roundtable.

On top of that, my family will be staying with me over Thanksgiving. Any guesses which challenge scares me most?

Are you taking any challenges this month? Do you find challenges useful, annoying, or meaningless? Have you ever tried something like this?