It's September 9th today and the nights have been starting to get cold recently. The daylight hours are shrinking, staying dark until 6 a.m. and the sun setting before 8'oclock at night now. When the air starts smelling crisp and the leaves begin to turn, men and women brave of heart and weak of mind begin to think of NaNoWriMo.

There are only 52 days left before you set pen to paper, or fingers to keyboard, and begin the slow ascent towards the goal of writing 50,000 words within the month of November. There's the thrill of the first day that you easily surpass your daily word requirement, the agony of the days where you struggle to make the bare minimum needed to ensure you'll scrape in under the wire, and of course the greatest feeling of them all — passing the finishing line as your word count clicks over the magic threshold to equal 50,001.

Labour Day weekend has been and gone, so the "Three Day Novel" writing contest has passed you by yet again. The only literary competition left which has nothing to do with merit, or lack there of, is the National Novel Writing Month. NaNoWriMo.

Let's face it - what else are you going to do in November? Talk about a depressing month; it's not winter yet so it doesn't have the redeeming qualities of snow to alleviate its greyness. It's not fall anymore so the trees are just naked sticks shivering in the dank wetness with no colours to brighten your day.

Sure, you can go for walks in the freezing rain and look at the Christmas displays the stores put up when Halloween's over. But why bother when someone has saved you the effort of figuring out how to stave off Seasonal Depression by driving yourself crazy with an attempt at achieving a goal that's difficult but not impossible.

Perhaps NaNoWriMo is a little too much like the old Chinese curse of "May you live in interesting times" for some of you in terms of the demands it will make - emotionally, mentally, physically, spiritually and psychologically. But I would think it's a fair trade off for avoiding depression. Instead of being like all the other grey spectres around you, bummed out by the weather and the very Novemberness of it all, you'll be frazzled, anxious, inspired, and ecstatic.

You ever see the movie Sean Of The Dead? It has these wonderful opening shots of people walking around like zombies going about their daily routines; cashiers at a supermarket scanning items and putting them in bags, people walking down a street in headphones all listening to the same music shuffling and jerking. All before anybody becomes a zombie; in fact some of them seem to have a little more purpose after they become undead - a focus is a marvellous thing.

That will be the difference between you and the November zombies that surround you. You'll have a focus. Something that will give you a purpose outside of your normal existence, something that will break you out of any rut that you may have fallen into with or without knowing it.