National Novel Writer's Month

That's what I did last year. Sortof. I mean, I wrote a little over 50k, all brand new words, during November. It ended up being this sortof... middle segment chunk that is pieces of the end of the one novel (began in NaNo '07 and now finished with another chunk I wrote independent of NaNo all together) and pieces of what will be the sequel of that novel (unfinished). I write non-linearly, and that's just how it worked out. At the end of the day (month) it turned out to be a couple of fairly cohesive large chunks, some of which I wrote straight through and some of which I sortof framed and filled out. I never have had the impression that NaNo wants to really box anyone in to any one particular process, which is how I would view hard and fast rules like you MUST be writing on a totally virgin idea to you and you MUST write beginning to end and your novel MUST hit and fit within a target of 50k or so words, et cetera. But, obviously, you can't include pre-existing work in your NaNo word count cause that would also kinda defeat the point.