NaNoWriMo Begins!

Note: this post contains a link to the National Novel Writing Month website. At various times during November, the demand on that site is pretty high, so links may take time to load or not load at all.  Be patient or try again later.  

Welcome to November friends. A time when the bluster returns to South Texas and we start to juggle plans for Thanksgiving and Christmas. But more importantly, November is the time when tens of thousands of people take leave of their senses and try to write 50,000 words of a novel in a single month!

National Novel Writing Month, Thirty days and nights of literary abandon!

At that website, you can register and post a picture, link up to regional forums and find Wrimos near you, tell us something about you and what you want to write, get a badge for your blog, check out the new and improved nifty statistical tracker.  Then you have to write.  Every day is best, but whenever you can is good too.  As you progress you can enter your word count.  If you enter some new words every day, then you can watch your graph fill up.  If you link up with some writing buddies (I’m Eglentyne over there, so buddy me), then you can cheer for each other, help each other through the misery of dredging up words, and celebrate together when it’s finally over on November 30.  The winners are everyone who achieves a personal goal, but especially those who manage to write at least 50,000 words in a single month.  The prizes are the personal satisfaction of having accomplished something difficult, the joy of sharing that experience with a lot of other people, and any of the stickers, tshirts, or goodies you want to buy in order to support NaNoWriMo.  Read more at the NaNo site about the great programs created by NaNoWriMo and and their parent organization (The Office of Letters and Light) and sibling program (ScriptFrenzy).  

There’s no shame in failing as long as you’ve given it your best shot.  And even if you can’t be a Wrimo, you can sponsor someone who is, you can make a donation to the cause, or you can cheer on those who are answering the call to abandon caution and write like the wind.  

This will be my sixth NaNo.  I’ve been a winner each of the five years I’ve participated, and I can tell you that NaNo is one of my favorite things all year.  Group participation, a deadline, and that nifty word tracker are all amazing motivators to get my butt into the seat and write every day.  

I have two personal goals for NaNo this year.

1. Write 2500 words each day.

2. Spend at least one hour each day revising my NaNo project from 2007.  

I also have some rules for myself.  Ok, just one rule really: no Tweeting, blogging, or Facebooking until my daily goals are met. Full disclosure: I’ve met my writing goal but not my revising goal today, so I blew the rules right out of the chute, but I’m excusing that because I really only decided on the rules and the goals this morning—cutting myself some first day slack.

In order to meet the 50,000 word goal for November, you should try to write at least 1,667 words each day, every day of the month.  That’s what I did in my first NaNo and it worked just fine.  Some days I didn’t write that many words, some days I wrote a lot more.  That was sort of a high-pressure scenario for me, and because of various distractions, I ended up having to pull out a couple of 3,000 and 5,000 word days to squeak out with 1,600 words on November 30, 2005.  The next year I decided to try to write 2,000 words every day, so that I would have some built-in Off Days, for those times when life sucked me out of writing (like Thanksgiving Day or almost any day with a sick kid or a sick me).  This worked much better for me. This year, I’m stepping up the goal to 2500 words, both so that I have more free passes and because I’d like to get down as many words as I can in the month.  I’m only going to use my free days if I really need them, so I’m hoping to hit November 30th with well over 50,000 words and a complete (if completely ugly) draft.  

I’ll put a word count widget in the sidebar in the coming days (only after meeting goals, of course) or you can click through my NaNoWriMo participant badge in the far right column to link through to My NaNo page and see my full statistics.  Better yet, join me in the literary abandon and put some words of your own onto a page.  I’ll be here to cheer for you if you try.  

Comments

[Cab]

"And even if you can’t be a Wrimo, you can sponsor someone who is"

Is that kind of like, if you can't be an athlete, be an athletic supporter? ;-)

Good luck, Ms. Dani! I will, uh, not be joining you in this endeavor. I'm full of hot air and bluster, but not to the point of writing novels. It'll be fun following your word count. Go go go!!!

[Eglentyne]

Thanks for being my jock strap--uh, I mean writing supporter, Cab. ;)