http://merbc.invigorated.org/archives/2008/10/20/tips-on-winning-nanowrimo/

Are you ready?  Do you have your plot outline finished?  Character bios?

(yeah, me neither, but I’m working on it!)

Nanowhoha?

Say it with me: Na No Wri Mo.  It stands for National Novel Writing Month and it takes place during November each year.  The challenge is to write a brand new, fresh out of the creativity oven, 50,000 word novel in just one month!

Can you believe it?  Fifty THOUSAND words in 30 days!  That’s the ultimate goal, but I have a much more achievable goal in mind first:  I just want to do better than I did last year.  Last year I ended up under the gun to get my GIAC Incident Handling certification by December 1st, so I ended up in a 6 day class in New Jersery for the first full week of November.  The class went from 9:00am to 9:00pm nearly every night, so I didn’t get a lot of writing done that week, and when I came back I spent most of my time studying for the two exams.

The good news is that I did indeed get my GCIH certification on time. The bad news is that I only managed to eek out a meager 1200 words for the entire month.

I’ve been training up for the competition this year by writing 1000 word short short stories on a semi-nightly basis and I’ve been rather proud of some of my mini-creations.  Maybe I’ll share one or two of them here some day.   In the meantime, I’ve been resting up for the last week with nearly no creative writing whatsoever.  Now starts the run up to the starting line:  I’ll be doing some plot and character sketches, an outline or two, that sort of thing.  However, I am still adamant that the primary style will be the same as always:  Start with a sentence and let the story take me where it will.

That style has been very successful for me in the sub 2000 word stories I’ve been cranking out, but how will it hold up beyond that?  If all I do is beat my wordcount from last year, I will view this as a success (so I just need to write for two full nights to be successful ::grin::)  I do still dream of actually hitting the 50,000 mark and I want to see just how close I can get.

Follow along with the Nanowrimo badge I’ve added to the bottom of the sidebar.  It will display the number of words I’ve written (although it relies on me to update the site, so it may lag a bit behind from time to time)

Who else is up for the challenge this year?  Charlie?  (He’s a winner from last year!)  Kevin?  (You know you have it in you…)  Christopher? (You can do it!)  Who else?  Leave a comment here and play along!

Keep your fingers crossed, say your prayers and get ready to start writing!