Cougars & Mustangs: NANOWRIMO is just around the corner 

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College, as I’m sure we all know, is a very stressful time. It’s a time of growth, and discovery about who or what you want to be. Undeclared is the most popular major, right? The college student’s life is turbulent! With all of this worry and uncertainty, possibly with its longtime side-effect of excruciating self-doubt, I find it necessary to gently scream at you the age-old question:

“And just what are you planning on contributing to society?” Personally, it’s nothing that I have to worry about, after having invented the ever popular Internet acronyms ‘oftpt’ (off to put in toast) and ‘oftrt’ (off to receive now-toasted toast), two sets of letters that help ease tension between you and a chat buddy by effortlessly eliminating any worry about why you’ve been brbing so much over the course of a single chat. However, for the rest of the student population, other solutions to my endearingly-brash question must be devised, and not all of them involve ferret parades. Reach deep inside yourself for the answer. Deeper. Deeper. No, that’s a bit too deep.

Remember that novel you always said you’d write? Do you have that in you anymore? Did you ever? This November, you can try and find out! Books are marvelous things, full of adventures and truths. You yourself can try your hands at dancing someone’s soul into a wonderful new land by participating in NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month), a celebration of the vocabulary arts billed as “thirty days and nights of literary abandon!” In other terms, it’s a self-driven event in which you try your best to write a 50,000-word novel, over the course of one month. As long as it’s fiction, the genre doesn’t matter—it can be gothic horror inspired by bubblegum pop band lyrics, speculative fiction, historical drama, science fiction, or anything. Maybe you’ll write Tugged Heartsprings, one college student’s first true love (his bed, which lets him sleep). Maybe it’ll be the Pulitzer-prize-winning children’s Roaring Twenties Cyberpunk, in which through unnecessary metaphor you explain to me just what exactly a ferret parade is. Whatever idea you try, just keep at it until your goal is met. It’ll be a satisfying feeling and a satisfying final product, even if it doesn’t seem that good at first. The goal of the month is not to write the next big novel so much as starting to write a novel in the first place. It’s fulfilling work, I’m sure, if tiring, so make sure you can keep a handle on that homework of yours and then visit nanowrimo.org for more information!



Intern Chris White-Sanborn used to spin yarns, but then the yarns got unraveled and he got tired of getting tangled up. Send your collegiate news to [email protected].