Welcome to November! A time of hot cider, pumpkin pies, red maple leaves, and crisp weather. Cloudy days with the temptation of words falling like raindrops and pre-Thanksgiving Christmas celebrators secretly blasting Christmas music. It's glorious. Normal people call it November. The writing world calls it NaNoWriMo.
Sound it out: Na-No-Wri-Mo
Sounds kind of dorky, doesn't it? Makes me think of Rhino's and noses. Still, this year I shall embrace the dork (only because it's the first year I've actually known what NaNoWriMo stood for). NaNoWriMo is the shortened version of National Novel Writing Month. I previously knew it as a weird name for a time when all authors-to-be freak out and try to write 50,000 words in a month.
Once I knew the true name for NaNoWriMo, my writer-starved brain instantly conjured a set schedule and a glorious excuse to write for 30 days straight.
"You don't have to reach 50,000 words," it said to me with a crazed look. "Just engage in National Novel Writing Month and try and write more. That's all."
"But it sounds silly," I argued.
"YOU NEED TO WRITE! Your high horse is collapsing anyway."
It's true. I've been dying to write. I fall asleep thinking about writing, I count down the days until I have that extra hour on Thursday to sit before my novel. *sigh* NaNoWriMo is an excellent excuse to work myself even more to the bone (and like it!). So I chose to humor my twitching, anxious, writer-desperate brain. I handed it a cookie jar of words and started scratching out a schedule and a strategy for the month of November.
The plan: Write every day (even if it's for 5 minutes for 5 words).
The goal: REACH 50,000 words with my current novel, A Time to Die. (I wasn't going to have a goal, but it's no fun entering a challenge without one, right?)
Starting word count: 39,182 (10,818 words to go). To put you in perspective, I've written 10,000 words over the past 5 months. *shame*
Have you ever heard of NaNoWriMo?
Have you ever participated in NaNoWriMo?
Are you doing it this year?
Trivia: Did you know that the recent NY Bestseller, Water for Elephants by Sara Gruen, was written during a NaNoWriMo?
Have you ever heard of NaNoWriMo?
Have you ever participated in NaNoWriMo?
Are you doing it this year?
Trivia: Did you know that the recent NY Bestseller, Water for Elephants by Sara Gruen, was written during a NaNoWriMo?
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Nadine Brandes is an adventurer, fusing authentic faith with bold imagination. She writes stories about brave living, finding purpose, and other worlds soaked in imagination. Her debut dystopian novel, A Time to Die, releases 2014 from Marcher Lord Press, the premier publisher of Christian speculative fiction. When Nadine's not taste-testing a new chai or editing fantasy novels, she is out pursuing adventures. She currently lives in Idaho with her husband. You can find out more about Nadine and her books at http://nadinebrandes.com.
Glad you are trying to harness some of that NaNoWriMo energy! I've done it several times (see http://blog.juliebihn.com/p/about-me-and-my-writing.html )--always the traditional 50k/30 days, no using a work you've already started--but the end result isn't usually easily salvageable.... (This year I need to edit, plus I don't need more IDEAS; I need more structure to the ideas I have, and NaNo isn't good for that.)
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