It's November - which means it's time to write a novel
Written by: Callie
A huge thank you to Kenzie for bringing this blog back from the grave. I don’t know if she was also getting the same emails I was but real talk here, we were about to have to pay for another year of Squarespace (not the cheapest website hosting format) which meant it was time to make a decision on keeping the blog going or calling it quits. I’m glad we’re still here.
November is here (crazy I know) and that means it’s time for NaNoWriMo! Did that make no sense to you? Let me explain.
NaNoWriMo - National Novel Writing Month for long, is a community that helps creatives stay on track and write a minimum of 50,000 words during the month of November. Here’s the blurb from their site:
Writing a novel alone can be difficult, even for seasoned writers. NaNoWriMo helps you track your progress, set milestones, connect with other writers in a vast community, and participate in events that are designed to make sure you finish your novel. Oh, and best of all, it’s free!
Kenzie, our friend Rachael, and I did this a couple of times while we were in college. We never fully completed the novel by writing the 50K words but we had an absolute blast planning the novels and writing as much as we could. I specifically remember two times that we all tried really hard to make it happen. I don’t know about the other two but in the back of my head I’ve always wanted to be a writer, the whole vibe just seems really great to me (yes, I know it’s actually probably not as much of a vibe as shows and books make it seem). We would spend hours at a coffee shop in October discussing our book plots and planning things out, bouncing ideas off each other. And then we would set weekly meet ups in November to write. Kenzie and Rachael always got much further in their books than I did. I think the most I ever wrote was 10,000 words.
Well, we’re doing it again this year! Kenzie sparked the idea and it’s always more fun when you have other people doing it with you, so I’m joining in! We’re trying to convince our aunt to do it with us too but we’ll see. I think I’m going to try to and do short stories this year. For a while after one of our college days NaNoWriMo i kept going after November and would write a one page story everyday. I did it for about a month and really liked it so that’s kind of the idea I’m going with for NaNoWriMo this year.
Rachael, if you’re reading this in Africa want to join in with us this year too? We’ll Skype some planning sessions. And to anyone else reading this that thinks this is a cool idea, join us too! You can sign up and do all the things like track your book at NaNoWriMo.org or you can just open up a Word Doc and start typing! And if you live in the Conroe area and want to meet up to have writing sessions in person let us know!
Okay, I just logged into my old NaNoWriMo account….from 7 years ago. And y’all my last novel was tentatively called Love at Full Throttle (about a motorcycle cross country ride) so if you think you have a stupid book premise or are embarrassed to share or try to write, just remember that I wrote 9,377 words of that awfully titled book and you can’t get worse than me! So take a stab at it and join us! My username on the site is CallieJade (and Kenzie’s is kenzie_and.friends, for whatever reason) and you can find me on it and we can help each other write all the things!
