Hello everyone!

I just wanted to post a heads up that during the month of November I won’t be as active on the blog because I’m going to be participating in NaNoWriMo again!! 

This will be my third year and if I beat the challenge again then I will have a first draft of my fifth novel!

For those of you who aren’t familiar with NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month) it’s a challenge presented by nanowrimo.org to write 50,000 words or to have completed your chosen project in 30 days (November 1^st – 30^th). While technically it’s for writing novels you could choose to write a short story or poetry collection I suppose. It’s completely free and you just sign up at nanowrimo.org so you can keep track of your progress, verify it on November 30^th and win cool prizes!

With the way I work as a writer NaNoWriMo really helps boost my productivity. It motivates me to write every day and to really focus and try to get my first draft completed. It’s definitely not for everyone but I personally enjoy the challenge. The first year I participated was my first attempt to write a novel and I finished with a 65,000-word draft (which had to be heavily edited LOL and now is finished at 90,000 words). Last year I finished a draft at 76,000 words (which was edited to reach about 88,000 words). And now this year I have no idea what’s going to happen but I hope I can at least get that first draft completed! (They say practice makes perfect, right?)

On the site for NaNoWriMo you can add friends, connect with people in your community or long-distance buddies, there’s writing tools, professionals give advice and motivators, etc. But I mostly use the NaNoWriMo platform for the immense satisfaction I get by entering my daily word counts and watching it plot out my progress. (Learn more about how NaNoWriMo works here)

Anyway, since I will be writing every day for long periods of time and I still have other duties in life (such as eat, sleep, clean, work) my blog will take a bit of a rest on the sidelines. I’ve worked hard to have some posts scheduled for you in advance though!

Cheers.

Are you going to be participating in NaNoWriMo this year?