NaNoWriMo

Those are the letters occupying 87% of my consciousness at present. For those who haven't been following my FB updates, on Nov. 1st I embarked on the journey best captured by this sentiment: "It's crazy, it'll never work, when do I start?"

NaNoWriMo = National Novel Writer's Month.
Apparently, for the last 10 years, this has been going on every year in November. A friend from church told me about it when I mentioned to him that I was trying to write a novel. The goal of nano is to write 50,000 words in November. That's about the size of Animal Farm by George Orwell, and other research indicates that an average fiction novel runs 60k-110k. I looked up Riven, by Jerry Jenkins, which Wendy and I read recently, and that's about 145k or something.

I'm going to try and add a nano widget that shows my wordcout, I've got that going on my FB profile already. Right now I'm just under 16,000. I never woulda thunk it! Before embarking on this nano experience, I spent 6-8 months to come up with 5,000 words. A lot of that time I spent doing research, day-dreaming about what kind of story I wanted to do, and creating a map of the world it would take place in.

I've felt bad for neglecting the blog, though. And a lot of advice I've been hearing from people, and reading on the internet, is related to the blog experience.

1) It's important to try and write every day, even if it's junk you throw out later.
2) It's important to update your blog often so that you develop web-presence, establish a following, and eventually help market yourself.

If you would like to see my nano profile, and read an excerpt, etc. go to the website and register. It's easy and free, just need an email address and password. Then click on the "Authors" tab and enter my user name: realdealneal