As I have every year for the past several years, I am once again participating in NaNoWriMo.

In case you haven’t heard anything about it, NaNoWriMo (which stands for National Novel Writing Month) is a month-long race against yourself to type out 50,000 words. Or more to the point, what it is is a challenge with the intention of showing one that they can, indeed, type out that novel if they take the initiative to carve out some time daily to write down some words.

This will be my sixth NaNo entry, and I’ve had varying levels of success. So far, the pattern seems to be that I will win every other year, and that being the case, I should be due for a win this year, since last year I made it a little past the halfway point of the 50,000-word goal.

I really don’t see that happening this year.

First of all, I did not even write a single word until five days after the challenge had already started, so I’ve already got that working against me.

The second issue is the fact that I homeschool my kids, and that fills up a lot of my time, which means that I need to work around their school schedule, as well as my errand schedule. The only time I have is either very early in the morning, or after my kids go to bed.

I’ve made the attempt to get up early, before my kids, but I’m truly not a morning person. I have a hard time getting up before 7:30, and by then, my kids are about to get up, if they haven’t done so already.

Which leaves the evenings. My kids are supposed to be in bed by 8:30, but between the antics of my five-year-old and the clinginess of the baby, who still believes she needs me in order to get to sleep, I usually end up not being able to hop onto my computer until close to 10:00 PM. Often later.

I’ve not been able to get out more than about 850 words in one sitting, and even the person that started on day one would need a daily minimum of 1,667 words in order to meet the 50,000 requirement. So the likelihood that I will win is very small.

But none of that matters. The real takehome is that I pushed myself to sit down and find time to write and that I’m doing it. And since NaNoWriMo is not a race against others, but to push yourself to do more than you think you can, I’d say that’s a win, even if not by the traditional standards of the NaNoWriMo challenge.