Failing Works Sometimes

In one of the textbooks we use for English composition class, an example of introductions points out that John Milton and Beethoven were both failures. Startling idea, right? How could they be failures when their work lives on centuries later? Well, they're failures because, although they achieved great things, they didn't meet their wildly outlandish goals.
I am setting out to be a failure tomorrow, and I want you to join me.
I have joined NaNoWriMo, again. NaNoWriMo stands for National Novel Writing Month. The goal is to write 50,000 words of a novel from Nov. 1 through Nov. 30.
It's a crazy idea. The reasons not to join stack up like dirty laundry in the basement, yet I signed up anyway for the fifth year in a row.
Fall quarter is the busiest for me. Thanksgiving at the end of the month always drags me away from my computer. I know if I focus on writing that my exercising will dwindle away. I just finished a novel and haven't even fleshed out my ideas for the next one.
Nevertheless, on Monday morning, Nov. 1, I will begin work on my new un-named novel.
The first year I took part in NaNoWriMo, I succeeded in writing 50,000 words.
Every year since then, I have failed. But if I get to the end of the month and I wrote 30,000 words, that doesn't feel so awful. Maybe I've only written 20,000 or 10,000. At least I've started thinking about and writing a new novel.
How many people spend years planning the novel they will write and never type out the words? The novel lives only in their head.
Face it, when is a good time to try to write 50,000 words? We'll always put it off another day, another year, another decade. When the kids are older, when work slows down, when I'm thinner, when we're wealthier... Excuses are easy to find. Time isn't.
So I signed up.
You'll find me under PaulitaK.
Sign up and friend me.
Let's be failures together.
Go to www.nanowrimo.org. It's free, but you can make a donation if you want to.