NaNoWriMo: Day one

I have endeavored upon two marathon experiments: entering NaNoWriMo, and blogging about my progress daily. For those of you who are unfamiliar, the bizarre acronym stands for National Novel Writing Month. It is an online program in which people from all over the world attempt to write 50,000 words (about 150 pages) between November 1-30th. So in other words, you have a month to write a novel. If you manage to win, your novel will be posted on their website, and other fun prizes will be awarded. You will also have the satisfaction of knowing that you wrote an entire novel under clutch Dostoevsky-style time constraint. (Come on, you think these people only do it for the prizes?) And if you don't finish, it is reflected on your profile and everybody will know. There's no such thing as cheating, either, because they have a program you have to run your complete piece through to ensure that it is a novel and not random jumbled letters for 150 pages.

This is the perfect assignment for a gap year student such as myself to undertake, because not only do I have the resources in terms of time, but I don't have to support myself financially yet. So if I sit inside and don't leave my house for weeks because I'm writing, I'm still going to be fed, and my home won't be repossessed due to unpaid bills. Come to think of it, what full-time students, or full-time adults have the time to sit down and write a whole novel? People at liberal arts schools who pick the majors with the least requirements? Bored, stay-at-home moms?

Speaking of bored moms, there's quite the broad array of novel genre categories available to choose from. Such categories include everything from erotic fiction, to horror (basically the same thing in every 80's slasher film), to stories for children/young adults. My novel is entitled "Monsters" and is in the suspense/thriller category, which almost ensures that it will be completely terrible. I signed up this morning,  I'm a day behind, and I've only submitted 450 words so far. The online progress tracker estimated that if I keep going at this rate, I should finish sometime around June 11, 2014... I suppose the next logical step from here would be to visit the website's "pep talk" page...