It’s November 1, which makes today the first day of “National Novel Writing Month”! If you haven’t heard of it before, this is the month when the brave, the daring and the possibly insane bust out their word processors and write that novel they’ve been meaning to all their life. It’s open to anyone who feels like doing it. The only requirement is that you must write a fiction story of some sort consisting of at least 50,000 words, all of which must be entirely written during the month of November. Short of that, pretty much anything goes.

Scary as it seems, 50,000 words isn’t that much when you break it down: It’s about 1500-2000 words per day–two or three long blog posts, to put it in perspective. It’s a tough but achievable goal even for the gainfully employed. The novels aren’t judged in any way except for meeting the minimum word count, so it doesn’t matter how bad your writing is. The point is just to get it done. Surprisingly, though, quite a few of the novels written in past years have gone on to be published, including the New York Times best seller “Water for Elephants”… presumably with some serious editing after the nanowrimo event, of course. 🙂

I haven’t decided yet if I’m going to participate–yeah, I know, I’d better decide soon, soon being now–but if I do, I know exactly what I’m going to write: a cheesy sci-fi novel. Didn’t see that coming, didja? 🙂

Tags: author, book, contest, nanowrimo, national novel writing month, novel, publish, writing

This entry was posted on Thursday, November 1st, 2007 at 6:28 pm and is filed under General, Totally Off-Topic. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.