A journey of 50,000 words begins with ...

a first blog post. On Monday, I'll join thousands of other writers -- and wannabes like me -- for National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo ). Every year for the month of November it's a full-out sprint of writing - 50,000 words in 30 days. The idea? Turn off your inner editor and get the words on the page.

I've had a novel bouncing around my head for five years. I've got characters, settings, death and other conflict, injustice, jealousy and revenge fully formulated. I even know how the story ends. But not a single word written down, because my inner editor has me paralyzed with fear of sucking. That and I'm a single mom with two young daughters, a full time job, a dog, a cat, a house that never quite gets clean .... Which makes NaNoWriMo perfect -- it's all about quantity, not quality. Which means my characters -- Abbey, Margo, Erik, Diana, Lewis, Gary, Beth, Natalie, Bryan, Chuck ... even the lunatic Marianne -- will finally come to life in about 1700 words a day.

And it all starts in just two days! The prose will not be pretty. It will not be publishable. But, instead of sparkling ideas floating around my crowded brain, it will be prose. At the end of November, I'll have 50,000+ words on the page. Some of them I will even want to keep. I'll be about halfway through with a draft of the story. And the pressure lifted from my brain will be liberating. Who knows where I might be able to go with a little extra room in my brain. I might just be able to Touch the Sky.