This week I guess you guys get a bonus post. Today is Donation Day for the Office of Letters and Light, specifically the program NaNoWriMo. Obviously, I know I talk about both the OLL and NaNoWriMo a lot, and if you are bothered by that, I'm sorry but I'm not going to apologize for it. (No one has really complained about me talking about it so much, but just in case...).
I love NaNoWriMo. It is an amazing program and without it I don't think that I would be quite the writer that I am today.
On Twitter today they are having people use the hashtag #whatnanomeanstome. What I feel for NaNoWriMo cannot be condensed down to 140 characters, so instead, I have this blog post.
I discovered NaNoWriMo in November 2005 and decided to participate for the first time in 2006. Since then I have never regretted that decision and November has become the month I look forward to each and every year. It gave me a confidence in myself and my writing ability that I wouldn't have had otherwise. In college when a professor would assign a paper that needed to be so many pages long I would laugh to myself, because nothing they assigned could ever compare to the challenge and exhilaration of writing 50,000 words in 30 days.
NaNoWriMo has introduced me to a community of people who are just like me, who love to write, to create, to challenge themselves, and they have formed a family for me. Though my parents say that they support me in anything I do, I don't really feel any encouragement from them. My NaNo family though is always there for me, and not just during NaNo-season. My region has started to meet all year round because we have found something special together while bonding over NaNoWriMo.
Over the years I have seen a number of NaNoWriMo participants get book deals and publish and see their writing dreams come true, and you know what, they started off just like me, a participant with an idea and a dream. Seeing the success of fellow writers really makes me believe that I am capable of following through with my goals.
I talk about NaNoWriMo all the time, to anyone who will listen to me. As an ML for my region, I absolutely love scheduling write-ins and going to restaurants, coffee shops, and the library to write. Just yesterday at a write-in one of my new Wrimos told me that I seem really passionate about this program, and that's the honest truth...I do.
When I dream with my friends about where I would like to move for work if I could go anywhere, well okay, I'd love to go over to Europe, but more realistically, when I think of somewhere in the United States, my answer is to go to San Francisco. I would love to be so close to the OLL headquarters and donate whatever time I could to help them with their creative efforts.
NaNoWriMo is more than just a writing challenge for me. It is a way of life, a calling, a family, a home. It makes me feel important and happy and exhilarated and smart and like I can be successful at something. NaNoWriMo means everything to me. I am so glad to have discovered this amazing program and I will continue to help in any way I can to support their efforts. Whether that is blogging, Tweeting, volunteering my efforts as an ML for my regions, advocating to anyone within earshot, I will.
Please...if you are at all able, consider donating to NaNoWriMo. It means so many different things to so many different people, but for me, as a writer and as a librarian, NaNoWriMo is about books: reading them, writing them, and loving them, and there can never be enough of that love in the world.
You can donate by going here: https://store.lettersandlight.org/donations
No comments:
Post a Comment