What did I just get myself into?

Over last November's NaNoWriMo, I made a few new friends, including a few of you readers :) Two of them I talked with so much, we exchanged emails and began to chat over the gmail chat function. One, Cat, I've talked about a lot before. I edited her awesome NaNo novel and we share a ton of food talk, life talk, well, anything. She's a great friend and confidante. The other, A, we talk almost exclusively music, books and writing. We have a lot in common, listen to the same music, read a lot of the same series and can spend hours talking about them and our own story ideas. We bounce ideas off each other and develop our plotbunnies much, much further than we would on our own. Yesterday, A and I got to talking about what our ultimate goals for our writing was with a simple question - Did I want to self-publish, or try to get published traditionally? I didn't waste a second answering: traditional publishing all the way. We spent maybe 10 minutes daydreaming together, our hopes and dreams for our future books. Every other response was "yeah, me too..." When we couldn't think of anymore, we got to the biggest problem with our daydreams - neither of us have ever finished a book. We've got countless ideas, but nothing complete. Then A said the thing that started this whole adventure, "We really should bludgeon each other. Accountability helps =P"

And I responded, "True...maybe challenge each other? =P Our own mini-NaNo."

So here's what we're doing. Starting next Monday, every week, we're writing. We're to shoot for the minimum word goal of 5000 words. Doesn't need to be a continuous story, as long as 5000 words get written each week. Whoever writes the most words over the minimum gets bragging rights for that week. We figured with me married and working and A in grad school, 5000 was a good range: not so high that we'd have to neglect our work or families to finish, but not so low we wouldn't be challenged. I don't know how long we're going to do this for, we didn't set an end goal. I think, well, hope, we're just going to keep going. We'll finish stories needing to be finished and start new ones. We'll try short stories and see what they lead to. Maybe once we get near completion of our first stories, we'll make a few changes to allow for editing. We'll see where this goes. I think it's gonna be fun, and hopefully with it, I'll be able to mark #29 off the list.

I'm bugging Hubby to join up with us and do it too. NaNo was great, but it wasn't enough for me, wasn't long enough to complete anything, and when that competition ended, even though I won, I lost the drive. I thrive on friendly competition. You write like a fiend for the month then fade away until next year. With this challenge, it'll go on as long as we need it, it won't be a mountain to climb then coast down the other side as soon as we hit a magic number. It's a mountain that'll keep on going, and with good company, the trip won't seem quite as hard. :)