NANOWRIMO - National Novel Writing Month

Okay, so how's this for I Can Totally Do That?  Write a novel in a month?  Sure, why not? Challenge accepted.


So a friend sends me a message in October saying, hey, do you want to try nanowrimo with me?  I, of course respond, "What the heck is that? Some sort of pokemon crap?"

Well, the short answer - no.

It is now November 28th, so I'm not going to make it, but thought I'd let you all know of the effort I gave it. First, let me explain the challenge.  The month of November is THE month in question, you, the writer are challenged to write 50,000 words during this 30 day period.  You update your word count yourself, occasionally pasting the entirety of your writing into a little box; it doesn't save you novel, just verifies the word count, and then shows you your stats - how many words a day you're averaging, how many you need to average to get done, when you are really going to get done if you keep writing as slow as you are now...stuff like that.

You get weekly updates from published writers with hints and tips, which is really nice when you're in week 2 thinking, WHHHHYYYYY am I subjecting myself to this, I'm never going to write anything that anyone will ever want to read.   Waaahhhhhh....  They encourage to go get more coffee and keep plugging away.  You also get to see a breakdown of your region, and they post on their own forums.  The Huntington, WV group has it's own fabulous Facebook page to encourage one another and meet for 'write-ins' which I've never done because bringing children along would defeat the purpose.  All in all, I really recommend it.  It has been fun.  I'm only at 36k words and a little over halfway done with my archaeologist/cop romance novel, but by golly I AM going to finish it.  (nanowrimo thinks by Dec. 11th at the rate I'm going)

Now, by finish, I don't mean ready to upload to Amazon Self Publishing, I mean, the first draft will be written.  I have whole chunks of this that are just dialogue, run on sentences, duplicated phrasing (my biggest pet peeve of 50 Shades is the repetitiveness, okay, he has LONG fingers, we get it already), but the story will be written, the rest is just editing....and re-editing...and then having someone who actually knows how to edit, edit it.  THEN it will be ready.

If you're interested in my effort, check out Chapter 1:
Playing Dirty


And if you're interested in being challenged to write a novel in a month (next November), here's the link.
nanowrimo.org

I hope you enjoy, and I'll let y'all know if I ever finish editing it! ;)