NaNoWriMo in July

[will_asher]

I will be gone from the *banding world from Wednesday until the middle of August. Most of the reason for my absence is that I will be writing a novel in July.

Has anyone else heard of NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month)? A guy named Chris Baty whote a book called "No Plot, No Problem" with the idea of writing a novel in one month as a writing excersize. The point is not to write something that's good and publishable (although it's a good way of generating ideas which can be re-written into something good). It's more to get yourself past things like writer's block and procrastination. To succeed the goal of writing a 50000 word novel in a month, we have to prevent ourselves from thinking too much about the story and write whatever comes into our heads whether or not it's any good. It can be a lot of fun (for people like me anyway..)

The official group with Chris Baty and the NaNoWriMo website do it in November, but I do it with a group of people led by a friend of mine in July. This is the sixth year that the group I've been doing it with has done it, and the fifth year that I am attempting it. I've succeeded with the goal twice before, and I've been re-writing last year's novel hoping to get it published sometime.

[fizzix]

I've heard of this before and I know people who've done it. Maybe I'll give it a shot at some point. Not this year because I'm already writing a 150ish page thesis, and that's enough writing for me.

Good luck, hope you have fun with it!

[konijn_]

Originally Posted by will_asher

I will be gone from the *banding world from Wednesday until the middle of August. Most of the reason for my absence is that I will be writing a novel in July.

<snip>
The official group with Chris Baty and the NaNoWriMo website do it in November, but I do it with a group of people led by a friend of mine in July. This is the sixth year that the group I've been doing it with has done it, and the fifth year that I am attempting it. I've succeeded with the goal twice before, and I've been re-writing last year's novel hoping to get it published sometime.

I find myself procrastinating here when I need to do something like that
Good luck, is the July attempt something public with a website ?

T.

[will_asher]

@fizzix
150ish pages is quite a lot more than 50000 words.

@konijn_
The group I do it with is pretty much a group of friends (mosty friends of my friend who organizes it, so I don't know half the people), so no. We used to have a Wordpress page which IIRC was viewable by anyone, but this year we switched to a private facebook group. I don't see the need for privacy, but I'm not the one organising it.

[andrewdoull]

You'll be joining excellent roguelike company. I believe both Glenn Wichman and Jeff Lait have competed.

Andrew

[starstealer]

I've never done one - but it was something I looked at a while back. Since it has come back to the forefront of my attention though, I figure I might as well see if it will help kickstart my writing.

The best I've ever done (unofficially) was 36k words in a one month period. Though, that was pre-kids, pre-college and during the summer after graduating high school.

[will_asher]

Just to mention the results of this July: I hit the 50K work goal (about 9 days early!), but I didn't actually finish the story.

[will_asher]

Goodbye for a month again. This time I'm doing it in the official month of November (starting in 15 minutes in my time zone). July was too busy this year, but I still want to jump start my writing habit again.

[artes]

I won't do nano this year because I have a game to complete with a long list of things to do.