Like the worst kind of racial slur, November has reclaimed itself.

Commonly associated with having to wear a scarf aaaaaaall the fucking time and the growing unease at having to legitimately consider Christmas, November has always been the Bastard Month. The asthmatic middle child: neither as precocious as May nor as sexy as December. In the last few years however, November has moved out and presumably now lives in East London.

November became ‘Movember’. Men throughout the Western world were being paid to grow moustaches, seemingly in aid of testicular cancer, but  truthfully in aid of moustaches. After the moustaches had been grown and admired, it was decided that the moustaches could serve as some kind of creative aid, and lo National Novel Writing Month was conceived. Or, NaNoWriMo.

The goal of NaNoWriMo, other than to sound like an elderly Japanese woman, is for each participant to write 50,000 words within the month of November. NaNoWriMo claims to “value enthusiasm and perseverance over painstaking craft”, which, I have to say, is kind of awesome. Write first, ask questions later. Even if your novel sucks there’s bound to be an awesome paragraph in there somewhere about mortality or sex or jumpers or something. And plus, you will actually have written your novel. Do you know how rare that is? The only person on Work in Prowess to write a novel is Janina, and that’s only because she’s some kind of superhuman gypsy curse.

In honour of November’s sexy new hipster look, write a novel, and grow a moustache. OR, if you don’t want to do that, look at these famous men who wrote novels and grew moustaches.

Like Kurt Vonnegut!

 

Or Flaubert!

Or, sexiest writer of all time, Ernest Hemingway!

Or how about that crazy mo’ Mark Twain?

Will you be doing NaNoWriMo or growing a moustache? Why or why not?