Letter From The Editor

Contemplating his process of covering the presidential campaign in Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail in ‘72, Hunter S. Thompson wrote, “There is hardly a paragraph in this jangled saga that wasn’t produced in a last-minute, teeth-grinding frenzy. There was never enough time. Every deadline was a crisis.”

Yet, he acknowledges, he was surrounded by other writers who seemed to meet even more stringent deadlines with ease. He goes on to wonder why it’s always like that for him and — where it gets interesting — muses if it’s like a jackrabbit running across the road: “There has to be a powerful adrenaline rush in crouching by the side of a road, waiting for the next set of headlights to come along, then streaking out of the bushes with split-second timing and making it across to the other side just inches in front of the speeding front wheels,” he wrote.

The implication being that, just maybe, on some level, he does it all on purpose.

Well, each November, there are people who put themselves in that type of “last-minute, teeth-grinding frenzy” on purpose — nearly 350,000 of them, in fact. It’s for an event called National Novel Writing Month, in which writers challenge themselves to write a whole novel in just 30 days. We checked in with local participants at various points throughout the month, and in this week’s feature story, we look at who these people are, what they’ve accomplished through the event, and mostly why in the heck they’d want to do this.