Excerpts from the wrap up letter from Chris Baty - NaNoWriMo

Whatever magical forces were afoot this year, we collectively managed to write 1.6 billion words, demolishing last year's count by nearly 500,000,000 words. Wow!

The sneaky secondary mission: Jobs. Having a job is one of the greatest, trickiest things you can do as an adult. Employment brings perks like challenges and growth and (sometimes) money. But the longer you work at a job, the easier it is to confuse what you are doing with what you can do.

Each of us has a wealth of talents spread broadly over domains both marketable and deliciously impractical. The tricky part is that we tend to develop the former at the expense of the latter. Passions become hobbies. Hobbies become something we swear we'll get back to when we have more time. Or when the kids are grown. Or when the stock market recovers.

Which means we leave unexplored many of those paths that ultimately make us feel most alive—the moments of creating, building, playing, and doing that lead to extraordinary and unexpected things.

Like writing a book.

Or, more loosely, postponing the must-dos of the real world to spend 30 days exploring an attractive, improbable dream.

Giving ourselves that time is so important. Because the world can wait. It's what the world does best, in fact. It was hanging out for 4.5 billion years before we arrived, and it'll be waiting around for another few billion after we're gone.

Our dreams, however, have much shorter shelf-lives.


Whatever you think you are, you are more than that. You possess a fearsome array of skills and abilities, and the most satisfying of these may be completely unknown to you now...Life is so short. Adventures beckon. Let's get packed and head out on a new one today.

Yeah...

Some how, some way I have managed to walk through hell and negativity and self-sabotage and have been lucky to end up in a safe and nurturing place. This place gives me permission to explore all the crazy, improbable ideas and dreams I have in my head, and I am finding they are not all so crazy or improbable. The working me does not have to be mutually exclusive of the creative me. I can make a living, save some money and do what I love to do, all in one fell swoop. I've heard it a million times, but thought it never applied to me, but it does. It applies to all of us if we let ourselves believe.