The Countdown has Started

NaNoWriMo roars down the quarter-mile in a scant sixteen days. Are we ready to roll?

1. Sign up! You have only your spare time to lose. And who knows, maybe you'll be the next Amanda Hocking or J.A. Konrath.
2. Get some advice: award-winning author and writing guru Larry Brooks has posted an excellent series of tips on Nailing your NaNoWriMo. For the complete gestalt, Larry's book Story Engineering brings all six of his "core competencies" for writers together.
3. Fill out your toolkit: although I fiddled around with yWrite and Scrivener for Windows, I've settled on the simplest of tools for my writing workflow: Metapad for editing text on my PC, and WriteRoom on my iPad. Dropbox stitches them together with 2 Gbytes of free cloud storage, so I can write on my PC at home, sync up WriteRoom then carry on writing while I commute by bus to work. If you absitively-posolutely have to look it up, the Dictionary.com iPad app is handy.
4. Start writing down your ideas and story structure. As Larry Brooks says, you don't have time to make it up as you go along for NaNoWriMo, you gotta have it planned out. If like me you've written stuff that went off the road into the swamp, or you just couldn't get the engine started in the first place, I really recommend Larry Brook's methodology to jump-start your story.

Tip of the hat to Nchele for the awesome photo!