101 Reasons to Stop Writing

(Or Fifty Percent Over, Ninety Percent Shit.)

Participants in NaNoWriMo are probably all too aware that their month of finger-numbing drivel production is half over.

You should be over 25,000 words by now: if not, you’d best step up if you want one of those shiny web icons.

Heather Dudley completed 50k in 12 days, and yet according to her comments here seems to have a reasonable perspective on it.

Mike Toot is a shade under 31k, Simon Haynes is just under 29k; on target, guys, hope it’s not shit.

NaNo’s participants this year have produced 491 million words, in fifteen days. (60 million of those are adverbs.)

One one level, this is an absurd number - unless you’re a slush reader for Harlequin Mills & Boon, you probably won’t read this quantity in your lifetime.

But, if you factor in NaNo’s estimated 75,000 participants, this is an average of 6,500 words. Guess a lot of people are finding out the hard way that writing requires work.

(I’m becoming convinced that NaNoWriMo is actually a covert distributed experiment, testing the Infinite Monkeys theory. They need more bananas.)