NaNoWriMo

Starting today, we’re joining 100,000+ people worldwide who have made a commitment to write a 50 thousand+ word novel in the month of November. It’s called National Novel Writing Month.

Neither of us has ever written a novel before. We had something entirely different planned for November, but found out about this yesterday. It’s a good thing we didn’t have too much time to plan, or we might’ve talked ourselves out of it already. I had trouble locating a copy of the book “No Plot? No Problem!” because all the copies at the libraries have already been checked out. All the local bookstores were sold out, too. I located one copy at a Borders in Minnetonka, so we hopped on our motorcycles and headed down there. Trouble was, we couldn’t get across the Mississippi river because the Halloween parade was still winding down in Anoka (which is the Halloween capital of the world). The temperature was only 41 degrees, and after two hours crawling along, following detours and watching floats leaving the parade, we drove back home and got in the car.

One of the things that Chris Baty talks about in the book is how to find your Forgo-able time so that you can have time on a regular basis to work on your novel. It’s also about letting go of perfection and just getting started. He mentions how hard it is to start something new as you get older – and he’s not much older than 30. Everyone who finishes their novel is declared a winner.