Brace yourselves. NaNoWriMo is coming.

NaNoWriMo season has arrived, and with it, lots of new things: A mobile-friendly website that lets me feed my forum addiction on the go, a new name of National Novel Writing Month for the 501(c)(3) non-profit that runs NaNo, and a Beyond 50k forum.

That’s right. Previously crammed in one thread, those of us choosing to write beyond the 50,000 word goal now have a space to vent about writing “only” five thousand words in a day or being behind on our goal even though our word counter says we’re way past fifty thousand words. Or chasing each other to our own goals beyond 50k, just as Nano rebels can find folks who are working on already started novels or editing or writing that nonfiction book on turtles.

Another feature I love: watched threads. I thought I would despise this because it was change from My Comments, but watched threads turns out to be really awesome. It’s basically your own mini-forum of threads you’ve posted to, except mine is semi-useful at best because I’ve played a few of the game threads and now they’re always on top.

Writing Buddies are a mixed bag. On one hand, the buddies and buddy of are on different pages this year, where in years past they were on the same page. This caused page timeouts for my buddy list and probably others with very large buddy and buddy of lists. But now buddies and buddy of show up in paginated lists, ten per page. This makes my lists useless at the moment because wow, I didn’t realize I had added that many people.

However, you can now sort buddies by recently added or alphabetically or by word count, which is an awesome feature.

(Sometimes I feel like I’m complaining about something silly when complaining about Nano site limits that are likely unique to me, like “my filet mignon isn’t cooked just right” or “the diamonds on my tiara are crooked”. But I’m good at pushing the Nano limits, at least?)

Oh, and Quix might have talked me into going for 250k words this year. Maybe. And by maybe, I mean she totally did. I’ve exceeded that only once before, when I was unemployed and had nothing else to do but write. That was 2010, the year I wrote 300,000 words. We’ll see what happens, especially since I currently have zero ideas I’m excited about.

But this is my twelfth NaNo and I’ll be in the Bay Area for ten days, including for Night of Writing Dangerously, and this NaNoWriMo is already shaping up to be awesome. I can’t believe it’s been eleven years since I discovered NaNo. That’s longer than many relationships and friendships and marriages last.

I’m getting more excited writing this post. Who else is in?