NaNoWriMo: A November to Remember

Judging by the weather (and also the calendar) November is just around the corner. That means it’s almost time for… NaNoWriMo!

Just in case you’ve never heard of it, NaNoWriMo stands for “National Novel Writing Month”. They can be found at http://www.nanowrimo.org/, and November is the time when NanoWriMo’ers gather together online and attempt to do the improbable – write 50,000+ words of a novel in 30 days (that's 1667 words a day). Last year I participated and failed, but this year I intend to win! To help both myself and anyone else who is thinking about taking part, I have compiled a list of dos and don’ts. It’s mostly don’ts – having failed I have more experience on that side of things.

Do
1) Write every day
2) Plan your novel ahead of time

Don’t
1) Give up
2) Get too far behind
3) Edit as you go
4) Care if what you write is crap (you can fix it later)
5) Have a baby in November

Not to point fingers, but it was entirely my infant son’s fault that I didn’t finish last year. I was on pace the first 5 days of November, and then my wife went into labor. Tyler was born on the 7th, and I got hardly any writing at all done after that. I’ve double checked with my wife, and she assures me that there is virtually no chance of another baby this November, so I should be all set to win. Winning, by the way, simply means successfully writing more than 50,000 words in the time frame – you compete only with yourself.

I’m The Allergen at http://www.nanowrimo.org/ so go ahead and add me as a writing buddy. You are going to take part, aren't you?

I'll continue to blog about various things throughout November, but there will likely be a noticeable NaNoWriMo bias to my blog posts. I consider this a good thing.