November, for most people, is a time for Thanksgiving. It's a time for turkey, pumpkin pie, cool whip and cranberries shaped like a can.

But not for me.

I mean, it is for me too, to an extent. Thanksgiving is one of my favorite holidays because it combines two of my favorite things: cooking, and eating. Who couldn't love that? And it's a major feature all Novembers come with.

But November for me is more important for something else:

National Novel Writing Month.

Every November, trillions of people around the universe set out to write a fifty thousand word novel in thirty days. That's about the size of Catcher in the Rye, for reference, or about 150 pages of type in Microsoft Word. It seems like a daunting task. Many fall along the way. Only the strong survive.

And I just have one thing to say.

Apparently, Vikings were big on the novel writing.

That's right! For the second year in a row, I've completed the NaNo challenge. This one is entitled Shadow Blood, the sequel to my un-award-winning NaNo novel last year, the young adult fantasy Shadow Soul (which I'm currently sending out to agents; yeah, it took me a year to edit and polish it to the point it wasn't embarrassing). When it's all said and done, it'll be about 65,000 words.

I know most of you don't see why doing this would be fun, or why this outranks cooking a turkey and stuffing my face with it. I can't really explain it coherently, but I'll do my best.

The jpegs they give you to pimp your win are definitely a big perk.

NaNo turns November into a stressful month. Three nights of the week I spend in coffee shops until late at night, cranking out words. I talk to my writing partner, one of my closest NaNo buddies, multiple times a day. (Well, maybe that isn't much of a change from the other eleven months of the year.) Every spare minute of my time is spent mulling over plots, characters, situations.

But for all that effort, you get something most people never have. You get a creation of your own mind, something that you created and made that no one else has done. You have a completed novel sitting on your desk, with characters that have a life of their own. You have made a world that lives and breathes with as much truth and power as the world you live in. Even if it is never published, even if no one else ever reads it, you have made something that's wholely from you.

That's why I love NaNo.

And also, because I'm an attention whore.

So, for all my fellow NaNoers out there, congratulations for a great 2008! And I hope to see more of you writing next year!