Hands up – who’s heard of NaNoWriMo?
That’s short for National Novel Writing Month, the literary challenge where once a year, amateur and professional writers from all over the world sign up to try and write a novel of at least 50 000 words during the month of November. Yes, you heard right – you write an entire book between 1 and 30 November. The theory is that what stops most of us who talk about writing novels from actually writing is the idea that we must write a Pulitzer prize-winning novel. After we read our first page and realise that this is not going to happen, we give up in despair. So what NaNoWriMo does is to take the emphasis totally off quality and puts it firmly on quantity. You end up writing every single day for 30 intense days and at the end, you might just have the first draft of something publishable.
Either that or you get to talk about “my unpublished novel” at every cocktail party from now to eternity 🙂
From the first time I heard about NaNoWriMo, I wanted to try my hand at it, but at the last minute, I always chicken out. And then… some clever souls dreamt up an event for slackers like me – National Blog Posting Month! All you have to do is undertake to post once a day every day for the month of November, and that’s what I plan to do. In theory, it will give me an incentive to catch up on some things I should have posted about months, nay years ago. In practice… well, we shall see!
So wish me luck and do pop back once a day to see what I’ve been up to.
Follow me every day in November as I complete National Blog Posting Month – a post a day, every day, for 30 days! Here are all my NaBloPoMo ’07 posts so far.