All Images courtesy of National Novel Writing Month
NANOWRIMO stands for National Novel Writing Month. The goal is to write a novel consisting of at least 50,000 words in the month of November. I have participated in this event six out of the past seven years, but have only completed once (although they do have a spring/summer writing event called CampNANO where the goal is only 40,000 words – I did complete that once).
I absolutely love NANOWRIMO. It pushes you to just write, and to heck with how good it is. Just get the thing down on paper. I walk around with several fiction novels brewing in my head at once, so once (sometimes twice) a year I devote a month to getting one of them down on paper.
This year it’s a little hectic because it is the first year that I am combining NANO with full-time travel, web design freelancing, and blogging. Whew! All I’d need is to throw some work camping into the mix for a full on over-whelm-fest.
This experience is causing me to carefully pay attention to time and priority management, which I think is a very good thing. Of course, my freelance web contracts come first, unless something has to be done on the RV in order to keep our southward momentum going. If all these things are attended to, then comes blogging.
NANO comes last in the priorities, even though it is closest to my heart. Sunday and Monday I didn’t hit my 1,667 word goal for the day (the amount of words you have to write per day to hit 50,000 on November 30th. Hopefully in the coming days here at Wood County I’ll be able to write over my goal and try and catch up.
I thought I’d be able to write or design while traveling, but Chloe put an end to that hope quickly. She hasn’t yet adapted to her house moving. So she usually sits on my lap and demands to be petted most of the time we’re moving.
National Novel Writing Month is supported by a non-profit (formerly called the Office of Letters and Light) dedicated to encouraging everyone to write that novel they’ve got in their back pockets. They also fund writing programs at all levels of education. Their Young Writers program is particularly effective.
For all you bloggers out there, this month is the month to write that novel! We’re only a couple days into the month, so it won’t be hard to catch up. Just do it. You’ll thank me when you’re done. 😉
Current NANO Stats (Updated Nov. 18th)
- Average words per day: 1,641
- Words written today: 2,435
- Total words written: 29,549
- At this rate I will finish on: Dec 1st