Megan Myers via Compfight
It’s that time of year again where writers around the globe carve out time from their busy schedules and pump out 1,600+ words on their laptops and drink inordinate amounts of coffee. National Novel Writing Month is here at last! If you’re a writer and you haven’t heard about NaNoWriMo then you either don’t know many writers or you’ve been living in a forest somewhere without an internet connection for some time–in which case this post will be missed by you as well. Anywho, I’ve decided to join the crowd of writers participating in the event by submitting the sci-fi novella I’ve already started to the NaNoWriMo website. You can check out an excerpt here. And while you’re on the site, consider signing up and writing a novel from scratch or continuing the novel you’ve already started.
I first discovered NaNoWriMo back in 2005 when I bought a book called Now Plot? No Problem! written by Chris Baty, NaNoWriMo’s founder. The book was an easy read and it motivated me to do something I once considered impossible: writing a novel. Even though it was March when I read the book, I decided to start my 30 day novel-writing journey in April and forego waiting until November. It took me 45 days, but in May 2005 I finished my first draft of The Blade Heir and felt an immense satisfaction from the experience. This month I’m hoping to recapture some of that glory as I make time in my schedule to hit the daily word count and write my second novel. I’ve got a good head start on the novella at just over 10k words, but laziness is not permitted this month!
As I begin this race, I want to encourage any writers reading this who have been on the fence with completing a full-blown novel or felt intimidated by the process to join me. This is seriously one of the most cathartic experiences you’ll ever go through and the best part about it? You just write and forget about editing. Words on the page is the name of the game not flowery language or award-winning literature. This is an opportunity to complete a first draft and push aside all the excuses. So again, I invite you to join me and sign up on the NaNoWriMo website. I’m on there as Adornoda, feel free to add me as a writing buddy.
Something else I should mention as this novel-writing extravaganza takes off is that the weekly posts on this blog might be affected. I’ll do my best to keep my weekly posts going, but no guarantees where NaNoWriMo is concerned. Best of luck to those you writing novels this month and hopefully we can all come out on Nov. 30th and say we finished the writing marathon!
