http://www.nanowrimo.org/index.php There is apparently a contest going on here in November that is right down my alley: "National Novel Writing Month is a fun, seat-of-your-pants approach to novel writing. Participants begin writing November 1. The goal is to write a 175-page (50,000-word) novel by midnight, November 30. Valuing enthusiasm and perseverance over talent and craft, NaNoWriMo is a novel-writing program for everyone who has thought fleetingly about writing a novel but has been scared away by the time and effort involved. Because of the limited writing window, the ONLY thing that matters in NaNoWriMo is output. It's all about quantity, not quality. The kamikaze approach forces you to lower your expectations, take risks, and write on the fly." The good news is that I could use something like this to jump-start my writing. The bad news is that it's already November 10th! It appears that writing 2400 words per day for the next 21 days will *just* put me over, but can I find the time to invent something in 21 days? I'm thinking of taking a very raw shot at the Aerie work for this contest and then cleaning it up. Perhaps I'll try my hand at a prequel or something. Here are the main elements: What: Writing one 50,000-word novel from scratch in a month's time. Who: You! We can't do this unless we have some other people trying it as well. Let's write laughably awful yet lengthy prose together. Why: The reasons are endless! To actively participate in one of our era's most enchanting art forms! To write without having to obsess over quality. To be able to make obscure references to passages from your novel at parties. To be able to mock real novelists who dawdle on and on, taking far longer than 30 days to produce their work. When: Writing begins November 1, 2003. To be added to the official list of winners, you must reach the 50,000-word mark by November 30 at midnight. Once your novel has been verified by our web-based team of robotic word counters, the partying begins. I'm pretty sure I can write 2400 words of crap per day - I'm just not sure I *want* to. So, is anyone else "in"? johne (phy) cook wisconsin, usa personal blog: http://breezeway.blogspot.com aerie blog: http://aeriepress.blogspot.com/ stormfort list: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/stormfort/ "There are only three rules to writing a novel; unfortunately, no one knows what they are." --Somerset Maugham (Here's another article with a little more information: http://houstonpress.com/issues/2003-10-30/calendar3.html/1/index.html <http://houstonpress.com/issues/2003-10-30/calendar3.html/1/index.html> Roughing It Cancel all your plans this month; you've got a novel to write BY KEITH PLOCEK "The only way I can get anything written at all is to write really, really shitty first drafts." -- Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird For many would-be literary types, writing a novel is a one-day endeavor, as in "One day, I'm going to write a novel." Most people never get around to it, or they become incredibly frustrated once they begin. "You feel like you need to live up to all your fiction-writing heroes. It never does, but the thing you read that so inspired you also sucked really badly when they first wrote it," says Chris Baty, the founder of an ingenious enterprise designed to help writers overcome the potentially crippling fear of a shitty first draft. Four years ago, Baty founded National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo), a time for the budding novelist in all of us to spew forth pages upon pages of really sloppy prose. "It appeals to people who don't see themselves as writers, who are kind of a little intimidated by the idea of serious writing," he says. Here's the deal: Participants must write a 50,000-word novel during the month of November. That's 1,667 freakin' words a day. Word counts are determined by an online computer that couldn't care less how good, bad or ugly each work is. Quantity trumps quality in NaNoWriMo. It's the literary equivalent of mining with dynamite; these novelists blow up an entire mountain in search of a few nuggets of pure gold. And an adventure. "It's fun to pretend you're a novelist," says Baty. "It's like being a kid again, where you got to be the crazy BMX hero or the spaceship captain or whatever. As adults, we don't get to do that enough." Thanks to online message boards, participants have the comfort of knowing they're not alone in their maniacal missions. The boards are a place where harried writers can find support, as well as inspiration, through friendly competition. "Every morning you're running through the list of people you know and trying to find out how far they got the night before," says Jennifer Bryant, the head of the Houston chapter of NaNoWriMo. "If you're focusing so much on beating someone, you're not worrying about the fact that what you're writing is crap," adds Rebecca Elsenheimer, one of Bryant's amicable competitors. The message boards are also full of novelists' wacky challenges to each other. "Last year, I had to insert a drunken grandma at Thanksgiving dinner singing 'Kum Ba Yuck' instead of 'Kum Ba Yah.' It worked out very nicely to the point that if I do try to get it published, I'm leaving it in," boasts Bryant. So what kind of frantic novels are people churning out? "You've got everybody doing everything. The nice part about it is that there are no set rules about what you have to do," Bryant says. Like many of the participants, Baty finds the desire to create a rough masterpiece much greater than the urge to polish it. "I find revising novels to be one of the hugest, most painful, hurts-your-brain-in-really-bad-ways processes," he says. "You've created this Byzantine world and suddenly you have to perform microsurgery on it. It's too bad, because all the novels that we've read that have just completely blown our minds have just been revised and revised." No worries: There's always National Novel Editing Month in March. _________________________________________________________________ Send a QuickGreet with MSN Messenger http://www.msnmessenger-download.com/tracking/cdp_games