It's the final countdown!!

Well it's snowing outside, I just finished all of my midterms, and I finally have my Halloween costume together. It must be the last week of October!

Ah, the final week of October. The week when people are finishing up with their planning and begin to hover on the NaNo site eagerly waiting for the clock to tick over to November. It gets me really excited to look down at the little counter at the bottom of the page and see that nearly 50,000 users are on the website at the same time as me.

Normally I would be among many sitting at their computers on Halloween night with cans of Mountain Dew piled up next to them while waiting for the race to begin on midnight. Unfortunately, Halloween is on a Monday this year, and I have a class at 8am on Tuesday and Thursday mornings. So I either really stock up on the coffee over the weekend, or I just write it the next morning during the lecture. Since I usually sleep in that class anyway, I don't see how it would affect me beyond that.

Even then, I'm super excited for NaNoWriMo this year. Right when I came to college, I immediately began making friends who will also be doing it! Though my high school was huge, I seemed to be the only one in it that was doing NaNo. But now I get to do the word wars and writing sessions that everyone's always talking about. After a bit of snooping, I discovered that there will be several writing sessions at my school's cafe, which means that I'll be meeting even more people who understand my writing plight!

Which reminds me, this is also my first time doing NaNo without my parents or siblings around. My younger brother seemed to be the only one who understood the thrill of writing, and even tried to participate alongside me one year (bless his little nine-year-old heart). My sister didn't get it, but she was supportive of me in past years, even giving me a congratulations when I won last year. My parents, however, seemed to have gotten it in their heads that all NaNo does is kill grades. Even though my grades never changed at all in past years, they seemed to think that I had so much homework that I couldn't possibly have time for anything else. This weekend, I'll probably get a few texts from my mom reminding me not to participate in NaNoWriMo this year because I'm in college so I have no free time.

We'll see about that.