What's your NaNoWriMo Story?

I've always been pretty good at throwing together a good short story. I've always wanted to try my hand at writing a novel at least once, if only to say I'd done it. A couple of years ago, I stumbled across a Squidoo "lens" -- like a mini-website -- describing the NaNoWriMo and linking to the website. I thought it was a neat concept, but at the time was busy with other things. I think it was a year later that I saw another reference to the NaNo and had a conversation with myself that went something like this:

"I don't have time to write a novel in a month and work a full-time job too!"

"How would you know? You've never written a novel."

"True, but I've written short stories and I know how long it takes me to write those!"

"Hmm, you've got me there. Still, you'll never know if you don't try it at least once."

*sigh* "Oh, all right. I'll give the boss my two weeks' notice on Monday."

So, last year I went ahead and tried my first novel. It's worth noting that I didn't actually quit my job. Of course, I also didn't make it past 10,000 words or so. Last November just got too hectic for novel writing.

Need help? Get a lesson from Uncle Orson

Mine is boring.
I used to be incredibly active on a fansite for Ameila Atwater-Rhodes and a girl posted about it on there. I decided to try it, even though it was already into the first week of November. Failed. Then promptly forgot about it until the next year when I got the e-mail from the site. I'd just finished a 50,000 word Novel that took me a few months to write so I decided to try again.
After that a group started up in Fairbanks (where I lived) and I decided to get involved with that... and I just seemed to be getting more hooked by the year.

On my Google homepage, for no particularly good reason, there's an "eHow of the Day" from the site eHow.com. One day, this came up:

How to Prepare for NaNoWriMo | eHow.com

... aaaand since I'd had a story in my head I'd been thinking about, I sort of took a spur-of-the-moment initiative and decided to go for it.

Assume nothing.

Financial issues forced me to take a quarter off from my graduate studies. Even though I go to work everyday, I became restless after a week or so and told my wife I was going to write a novel before the next quarter began. Yesterday she pointed out that there was only a month left and that I hadn't written anything yet. She signed me up. Now I must write 50,000 words by the end of the month or hang my head in shame for the rest of forever.

My ex-gf (current back at the time) showed me it and saying she was gonna do it. I figured I'd do it with her so she has someone to go through it with her and to take frustration and all that stuff out on. Plus I always wrote once in awhile so it seemed pretty fun to me. Not to mention I always seem to be tossing around several ideas that would make for a good read in my opinion, so instead of just waiting for someone to write it, I'd write it myself. Almost dropped out and decided to not do it with the now whole ex thing, but I decided that I still would because it still seemed rather fun.

My sister talked me into it several years ago, didn't get very far then and don't expect to this time. It's just the idea of trying to that gets me going, who knows maybe this year will be it.

Any number between 1 and infinity is meaningless.

Some friends got me hooked on the idea a few years back, and I signed up at eleven o'clock on Oct. 31. I went into that one with literally no planning, no preparation...needless to say, I don't think I even broke ten thousand. But, it was fun enough that I kept going the next year, and the year after that. And this year, I'm bound and determined to hit 50k. Probably because I'm so busy with everything else in my life that the idea of writing a novel is actually relaxing this year.

2009: SpiritWalker
2010: Cliche (if I can wait that long to write it)

A couple of friends have always talked about it in past years (and participated) and I have been working on a separate novel for about a year and a half. I decided maybe if I could bang out a new novel in this month's span, maybe I would be encouraged to sit down and finish the other one.

A long time ago, back in 2004: I told a guy I was interested in that I was a writer, and when our "relationship" began to sour one of the things he threw at me was that I never write. So I got on the Writer's Digest website, saw the link to NaNo, and was sucked into the shiny.

I won in 2004 and 2005, met Chris Baty in 2006, and have lost ever since. This year I will redeem myself! ;)