Even though I’m very sad about not doing it this year myself, NaNoWriMo was one of the key things that taught me how to start fighting back against my perfectionism when I first participated in November of 2005.

I’ve done it three times since then, and successfully completed a horribly raw and unedited 50,000-word novel twice. And I don’t think I’ve ever found a better—or more fun—crash course in how to throw your inner critic out the window (or at least lock her/him in a closet for a while).

So it’s worth stating again how heartily I endorse this program. If you’ve never heard of it and you’re intrigued, or if you have and you’re on the fence about participating, NOW is the time . . . because it won’t come around again for another year!

If you have specific questions I can answer about NaNoWriMo for you, feel free to post them in the comments below or send me a private e-mail at the address in the very bottom line of my “About Me” page. I’ll make a point of checking that at least a few times today and tomorrow.

I also want to make two offers for anyone who’d like to get involved . . .

If you do NaNoWriMo this November and would like a personal cheerleader, I’d be happy to be your NaNoBuddy via e-mail. You can send me your word counts if you want to keep yourself gently . . . ac-count-able (heh). Or you can just check in with me and tell me how it’s going, and I can reply with hearty cheering-you-on messages and any advice I can offer.

If you’d like to be part of this adventure of literary and creative abandon, but don’t want to actually, you know, write a novel, consider making a tax-deductible donation to the Office of Letters and Light, the parent non-profit which runs NaNoWriMo and other beneficial programs—many for children.

There’s something in it for you if you do, hopefully. A very good friend of mine is doing NaNo (again!) and she’s personally raising funds to get into a special Write-a-Thon here in San Francisco on November 22. If she makes her stated goal, she will not only get in herself, but she’ll be able to bring one guest.

That will be me.

If she raises enough to qualify us both to attend the third annual “Night of Writing Dangerously,” I promise to blog from there and give you an insider’s view of the unbridled thrills and excitement. Maybe I can even take a little videocam, record a few brief interviews with other writers, and post them here. (I haven’t included a video in a blog post yet! Hmmm . . .)

Oh, if you’d like to donate, you might want the link:

Donate to my writerly friend’s NaNoWriMo fundraising page here! Just click the link and then the “Sponsor Me” button (after reading her lovely page, of course).

So there you have it, ladies and gents.

A fantastic month-long chance to play with imperfection begins tomorrow.

You can join in if you’re inspired to.

If you do, you can take me up on my offer to be your NaNoBuddy.

And/or you can donate to the cause and hopefully get me in the door to blog from the Write-a-Thon itself.

Or none of the above. Of course it’s up to you. But I couldn’t resist one more reminder that NaNoWriMo 2009 starts at MIDNIGHT TOMORROW! )

It really was a great idea, if I do say so myself. My blog is about overcoming the kind of perfectionism that gets in our way by telling us that what we’re doing isn’t good enough. National Novel Writing Month (which I’ve written about before), is a month of hands-on practice in blasting straight through that mindset with wild writerly abandon.

So I was going to blog my entire NaNo novel publicly, right here, during the month of November.

Practice Makes Imperfect and NaNoWriMo—what a natural combination!

I got in touch with the organizers, and they were going to feature me in one of their daily Q&A spots. I would get to publicly practice what I preach in a very visible way, and maybe turn some people on to this annual event that I love so much in the process. We could cheer each other on, inspire each other, and keep that flow of raw, gloriously unedited words gushing.

Except then I heard an inner warning siren go off. It was followed by a voice:

“Wait, you’re the person who says she’s finally coming to grips with the fact that she can’t do it all, no matter how much she wants to. Who says she’s tired of trying to be superhuman. And who is already having enough trouble handling all the things on her plate now. And you’re thinking that you can manage to write 50,000 words next month on top of all that?”

Damn.

The disturbing truth is that once you embark on the path of self-awareness, it gets harder and harder to be in denial. Even when you really, really want to be.

So today I’m here to tell you that I will not be doing National Novel Writing Month this year.

And that makes me incredibly sad.

It would have been so joyous! Not to mention good for web traffic! I would have gotten exposure to many thousands of people around the world who do NaNoWriMo and visit its website, and who might have seen my Q&A feature and checked out my blog! I could have possibly been inspirational to people who were thinking about trying NaNo this year, or who were doing it but flagging in their enthusiasm, just by writing my novel publicly! And maybe some of them would have become regular readers or subscribers here at Practice Makes Imperfect! So many exclamation points that I will now miss out on!

Not to mention that I simply adore doing NaNo each November.

It is actually harder for me to not do it than to do it and drive myself into the ground. The latter has been (until recently) my modus operandi. I know very well how to pummel myself into submission over a goal that I’ve arbitrarily decided I have to achieve.

It’s much harder to admit that the world will keep on turning and that I will keep on breathing without my writing a novel next month. It’s so difficult to allow myself to just drop something that would prevent me from the self-care that I need to focus on right now.

Which is why I’m letting NaNo go this year. I need the practice in saying no to things I want so that I can say yes to things I want even more. Like health. And sanity.

BUT . . .

If you have ever wanted to write a novel, I cannot recommend NaNoWriMo highly enough. Here’s an excerpt from (again) my own previous blog post about it:

What makes the program so effective? It allows you to barrel right past your critical mind. You have to write so much so fast that quality concerns fly out the window—you just don’t have time for them. “I can edit later” becomes your mantra. And the amazing thing is that once you push past your initial resistance, get into the flow, and establish a daily writing routine, you realize it’s completely feasible to write 50,000 words or more in a month if you just keep writing and don’t overthink it.

It’s fun, it’s intense, and it’s probably the best training program for recovering perfectionists I’ve ever found.

If there is ANY part of you that is saying (perhaps very quietly) “yes!” right now, then I heartily endorse NaNoWriMo and suggest that you check out their website right away. Because this year’s novel-writing adventure begins at midnight this Saturday night.

If you decide to do it, I’d love to know so that I can holler and whoop and cheer you on!

And a hearty hail-and-well-met to anyone who has found my blog via that post. Welcome to you! )

The post has received many positive comments so far, indicating that it has struck a nerve. That’s very gratifying to me. Several people have even written things like, “Wow, I feel vindicated. Now I’m going to go write something horrible!”

Well, I’d like to invite you to go ahead and do so. And then if you’d like, you can post the results here.

You can either link to what you’ve written via a comment below, or even write something directly in the comments if it’s not so long that it will make scrolling difficult.

The only rules?

1. Nothing profane, deliberately insulting, or in general bad taste, please.
2. No judgment. Let’s all acknowledge that posting is scary, and cheer on anyone who takes a chance and shares what she or he has written publicly.

So . . . no praise or harsh words about any of the content, please. Just support for the act of writing and publishing itself.

Wahey! Let’s do this thing!!!

In my case, it was writing a novel.

Hardly unique–someone once told me that every other person you know dreams of writing a book, and I’d be surprised if it’s that few. But it’ll do to illustrate what I’m talking about. Since, you know, I’ve never tried to climb Mount Everest or anything.

I somehow learned to read at a very young age, and progressed rapidly from Clifford the Big Red Dog to Brave New World. Which I read when I was about 11 years old because I thought it had a cool cover, completely unaware that I was picking up a classic.

Science fiction and fantasy have always been my genres of choice, and even as a teenager I would sometimes think, “Hey, I could write this stuff!” But in my cocky self-assurance I never actually tried, except for a few false starts which never went beyond three pages. That was okay, because I “knew” that I could do it, and would when I was ready.

I’ve been ready for almost 20 years now. And I’ve tried to write a novel enough times to recognize my youthful hubris for what it was. Writing is damn hard, and writing something so lengthy is damn hard multiplied by 1,000.

When I finally conceded the level of difficulty involved, I was well and truly humbled, and I inwardly prostrated myself at the feet of all novel-writers past and present in abject apology. (Well, at the feet of the good novel-writers, at least. A woman has her pride.) The fire of my writing desire was banked, though not fully extinguished.

Then I discovered NaNoWriMo.

NaNo-huh??? Allow me to explain by way of a very short story.

The difficulty I’ve always had is with constructing a plot. Intriguing characters with rich backstories I can create by the dozen. I can do world-building pretty well, too, thinking through all the what-ifs of a culture I’ve created in my imagination. But to come up with an interesting narrative trajectory for my characters to travel? Nuh-uh. Never could do it in a way that kept me interested, let alone a potential posse of readers.

So one day about four years ago I was trawling the web for books on plot construction and I found one called No Plot? No Problem!Intrigued, I ordered it, only to discover that it wasn’t about plot construction per se. Rather, it described, in author Chris Baty’s hysterically funny prose, this odd-sounding event called National Novel Writing Month. Or NaNoWriMo for short.

This worldwide event happens every November, and you can join and participate through the Internet as well as organize and/or attend local write-ins if you live near other WriMos.

I joined, and wrote my first novel that November.

On day #1 I blocked so hard on the fantasy novel I tried to write that I simply could not move forward. I wasn’t ready to be quite thatimperfect yet. But I still reaaaaally wanted to do NaNo (as we affectionately call it), so on day #2 I switched gears and started a story about, amazingly enough, a woman about my age living in San Francisco, not liking her job, and looking for a career change. I guess it’s true we write what we know.

No matter—I finished the novel. All 50,000+ words of it. (50K is the goal at which you can officially finish and declare yourself a winner.)

If you want to write a book but your inner perfectionist has been keeping you from doing it like mine did for so long, I can’t recommend NaNoWriMo highly enough. You can do it on your own at any time, of course, but the support you get by doing it with everyone else in November makes the wait worthwhile.

What makes the program so effective? It allows you to barrel right past your critical mind. You have to write so much so fast that quality concerns fly out the window—you just don’t have time for them. “I can edit later” becomes your mantra. And the amazing thing is that once you push past your initial resistance, get into the flow, and establish a daily writing routine, you realize it’s completely feasible to write 50,000 words or more in a month if you just keep writing and don’t overthink it.

It’s fun, it’s intense, and it’s probably the best training program for recovering perfectionists I’ve ever found.

Maybe I’ll see you on www.nanowrimo.org this November.

Scared because here I am, writing my very first blog post. On my new website about perfectionism. And because I’m a gradually recovering perfectionist, I am—big surprise—afraid that it won’t be perfect. Amused because I’ve developed enough self-awareness to laugh at myself and think, “Sheesh. There I go again.”

So with great anticipation, excitement, and—yes!—definitely some discomfort and uneasiness, I’d like to welcome you to my new blog.

If you’re one of the folks along for the beginning of the journey—hi there, and thanks! For cheering me on, and for walking some of the way with me as I venture out into the wilds of Bloggery.

If you’ve discovered me later on by following a link or someone’s recommendation, or doing a web search—well, I’m ecstatic that you found me, because it means that my past is now talking to your present, which also means my blog and website still exist! So that is (will be? hmm…) very thrilling to me. Welcome!

This should be an exciting journey, because I’m damn well going to make it that way. First of all, I’m leaving my map behind. (Excuse me—brief pause while I wrestle the keyboard away from my Inner Control Freak, who just went into panic mode at that statement and tried to delete it.)

I should probably introduce my Inner Control Freak, who you’ll probably get to know if you hang out here a while. She doesn’t have a name (yet, though I’m not excluding the possibility), but she’s been known to make me print directions from both Mapquest and Expedia when I’m going somewhere new . . . just to be safe and make sure that both sources agree with each other. Or if they don’t, bonus! I can shave three whole minutes off the trip by going one way instead of the other, and that’s three more precious minutes I can spend Being Productive on a Current To-Do Item in my never-ending quest to Get It All Done! (Of course whenever I point out that keying in the addresses, printing, and retrieving both sets of directions takes longer than four minutes, my dear overprotective ICF rolls her eyes and says, “Now you’re just being difficult.”)

So anyway, no maps. And no travel guides or dictionaries, either. I’m going to explore the strange country of Bloggery as I go, learning its language and customs as I travel, rather than wringing the life out of the journey by trying to gain a dry intellectual understanding of the culture before I even set foot across the border.

In fact, instead of a compass, I’m packing my new spontaneometer. That’s right—it’s a nifty little device that will guide me not by my location in reference to some arbitrarily constructed system of coordinates, but by how I feel about what is happening around me. Instead of pointing north, the spontaneometer constantly points toward unstructured, spur-of-the-moment joy. The closer I orient myself to that direction, the happier I should be. Or so the box it came in says. We’ll see.

I would definitely enjoy having some companions on my journey, though.

I’m pretty easygoing and I get along well with most people, so if you’re interested, I’d probably enjoy having you along whoever you are. But what I’d really love is to gather a whole group of people who are struggling with perfectionist tendencies like I am. People who might like some of the by-products (being organized, prepared, respected for your accomplishments, etc.), but who are tired of feeling like they’re never good enough, fast enough, thorough enough, committed enough to excel at everything they “should” do or be as wonderful in every respect as they “should” be. People who, like me, are starting to suspect the validity of all those shoulds. Who are beginning to realize that by believing them, we’re “shoulding” ourselves in the foot, so to speak.

I think we’ll have a lot to talk about, and a lot of experiences to share. I even have some tips and tricks to share with you based on what I’ve learned so far.

So what do you say? Are you up for an adventure? I was careful to stock up before hitting the publish button (you know how we perfectionists are), and I’ve got pith helmets, cargo pants and spontaneometers to go around. If you’d like to join me, grab whatever you need and let’s go!