Rabbit, Rabbit, Rabbit. All Saints’ Day. #NaNoWriMo. For the past hour, I have been tossing and turning in bed. The past few days have been really hard for me, and I was planning on using NaNoWriMo to work through some of the issues, but things have been coming together in a very exciting way, and so for the past hour, I’ve been eager to start writing.

But before I get too far into my writing, let me provide some of the background. Regular readers of my blog will know that I like to start each month with a blog post beginning “Rabbit, Rabbit, Rabbit”. It harkens to a simple childhood time when that innovation was meant to bring good luck for the coming month. In this case, perhaps good luck for the writing, or good luck for the journey the writing is about.

For those of you that don’t know what NaNoWriMo is, it is National Novel Writing Month. Every November, people from around the world, I’m not sure how many, hundreds of thousands sounds about right, sit down to write a first draft of a novel. The goal, fifty thousand words in thirty days. Just sit down and write. No editing, just a first pass. You can always go back and edit later.

I’ve done NaNoWriMo various times in the past. A couple times I’ve ‘won’, that is completed fifty thousand words in thirty days. Other times, I’ve hit roadblocks. Still other times, I haven’t even tried because of too many other things going on in my life.

I had not been planning to do NaNoWriMo this year, because of everything else going on in my life. Yet things took some unexpected turns, so I thought maybe I would try a combination of what I tried, unsuccessfully, a few years ago, with various other ideas kicking around.

The idea: Write a stream of consciousness. semi-automatic, semi-autobiographical memoir and reflection on what I’m learning through all of this. I expect during the coming month, I’ll go into much more detail about what ‘all of this’ is really all about. In fact, I was hoping to use NaNoWriMo as a tool to help me figure out some of that.

However, as I lay in bed, ‘all of this’ started to make a lot of sense, a lot more sense than I was ready for, and the shape of my writing may be shifting a little to reflect this.

To reach fifty thousand words, I need to write between sixteen and seventeen hundred words a day. If the words flow well, that isn’t too bad. They’ve been flowing so far, and over the past fifteen minutes I’ve written between four hundred and five hundred words. At this rate, all I really need is an hour of solid writing a day. However, as I’ve learned from other NaNoWriMo efforts, there isn’t always seventeen hundred words worth of thoughts in my mind when I sit down to write, so some days come up short, or take much longer than they should.

Given the nature of my journey, I am not planning on sharing much of this year’s writing on my blog, at least at first. This introduction is an exception, and there may be other exceptions as well. I do expect to share other parts with a limited group of readers. Let me know if you are interested in reading some of these other parts, but don’t be disappointed or take it personally if I say no.

With all of this out of the way, on to day one of NaNoWriMo. Wish me luck.