Well, it’s November 1st, and that means that NaNoWriMo has officially started. For the uninitiated, NaNoWriMo is a monthlong write-fest for people like me to write 50k words in 30 days. It sounds crazy, but the whole point is to get the story down on paper. Don’t edit, don’t stop. Just keep on going till you get to 50K and even higher.
It also stands for National Novel Writing Month and here’s the official information from their website:
National Novel Writing Month is also a 501(c)(3) nonprofit (formerly known as the Office of Letters and Light) that believes your story matters.
Through all our programs, we work to empower and encourage writing and vibrant creativity around the world:
- The Young Writers Program promotes writing fluency, creative education, and the sheer joy of novel-writing in K-12 classrooms. We provide free classroom kits, writing workbooks, Common Core-aligned curricula, and virtual class management tools to more than 2,000 educators from Dubai to Boston.
- The Come Write In program provides free resources to libraries, community centers, and local bookstores to build writing havens in your neighborhood.
- Camp NaNoWriMo is a virtual writing retreat, designed to provide the community, resources, and tools needed to complete any writing prompt, novel or not.
I’ve always been an advocate for literacy so this ticked all my buttons when I first heard about it three years ago. I totally failed the first year, churning out 16K words after ten years of not writing. But the bug hit me then, because the following year, when Camp NaNoWriMo came along, I churned out 90K words of a novel whose character of Greg became the basis for Erik Maystrom in Finding Sam a year later.
That was a major accomplishment for me and I realized that even after churning out 140K words of fan fiction, I could also write just about as many words, even more, of original fiction.
For last year’s NaNoWriMo, I wrote Loving Ashe, and by the time I was done, I had 110K words done in a month and a half. Then off to the editor followed by 8 months of percolating till I hit the publish button in August of this year.
This year, I’m rewriting the second book of the Loving Ashe Trilogy, Loving Riley, for my NaNoWriMo project. With everything from the beginning to the clunky ending, the poor baby needs a major overhaul so instead of jumping into a whole new story, this month is devoted to Ashe and Riley (well, maybe Collateral‘s Heath and Billie, too, which is in editing phase) so I can get them through that awkward growing phase in any relationship. It’s also Ashe’s story, which turned out to be more stressful to me as a writer because I had to rake my poor muse through the coals in this one.
If you’d like to see my rewriting progress, check out my Loving Riley page here and if you’d like to be updated of the latest chapters, opt in with your email address as well. I think Leanpub has an option to integrate Mailchimp, which is an email software, but I’ve yet to even figure out my Mailchimp return address (oh the joys of having your own massage practice yet needing to get a PO box for your writing career).
Leanpub, which is where I’ll be hosting Loving Riley as I rewrite it, is an awesome platform for serialized fiction, with variable pay ranges for readers to choose, even more than the suggested retail price. You see exactly how much my royalty will be, and because I’m choosing NaNoWriMo as the cause that I’m supporting, you’ll see just how much of my net proceeds will go to them.
I wrote about Leanpub last year but need to do a new one since they’ve done some major changes to their site, making it easier for writers to now upload finished work instead of having to write in markdown language. While I already do write in markdown language, majority of people I know don’t.
It’s primarily populated by technical books and while it intimidated me last year, I realized how serialized books in technology works so well because coding wins and fails depends on open communication between readers/testers. But its founder has always maintained that it’s a platform for fiction writers, too, and I was really impressed already with its output epub, mobi and pdf output. This year, with its latest updates in the interface, I’m giving it another try with my novels. I also like that you can automatically allot a portion of your royalties to a cause you choose.
Alright, for Day 1 of NaNoWriMo, I sure am chatty, aren’t I? Oh well, hope I didn’t bore you too much and I really need to get started with the rewriting.
What about you? Are you dong NaNoWriMo this year?
Via Liz Madrid http://lizmadrid.com/2015/11/01/nanowrimo-files-day-1/
Morrighan's Muse 