Those are the words I shall be saying quite often this month. That’s right, folks:  National Novel Writing Month has finally arrived.

It’s the morning of the third day, and I’m already 8,391 words into my novel, Voices of Penance. (Sad thing is that I know people who have several thousand words more already!) It’s awful, of course — the characters are poorly developed thus far, the pacing of the plot is horrendously off, and there are already several large, gaping holes in the overall storyline. But! I’ve been a good little NaNo’er and have been completely disregarding all of this.

It amazes me how much it helps to have family/friends participating, though. My sister is taking part, of course. I have a few friends here at college doing it this year, too…and I’ve sort of stumbled into (so far) friendly competition with at least one of them.

It also amazes me how much spare time I can actually find in a day…I mean, 8K…on top of homework, work, and other responsibilities that people like to give me. Granted, it’s only the third day, and I may very well end up feeling overwhelmed at some point this month. But so far, I’ve been keeping up pretty well.

At any rate, I ought to end this and get going…I have some stuff that I want to get done, and since I can’t work on my novel any more today until I finish this list…I must finish it as quickly as possible.