IIt’s November which, for many authors, means there’s only one question on their minds: who’s doing NaNoWriMo and have you won yet?
For the uninitiated, NaNoWriMo is a not-for-profit organisation whose stated aim is to “help people find their voices, achieve creative goals, and build new worlds—on and off the page”.
Since 1999 they have set writers the challenge of writing a novel within the course of one month. Those who get to at least 50,000 words before the end of November “win” NaNoWriMo.
And do you know what? It works. There’s something about committing to a deadline that motivates us poor humans to stop prevaricating and get cracking with our writing. To date, they have over 798,000 active novelists and almost 368,000 novels completed. Wow.
It’s also produced some amazing books. You may have read Wool by Hugh Howey, or The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern, (both great books by the way) but not known that they were actually both written as part of NaNoWriMo.
Last year, we at Burning Chair tried and failed to do NaNoWriMo. But we learnt some valuable lessons, and… guess what?
Yes, that’s right: Pete has, in a fit of stubbornness, signed up to this year’s NaNoWriMo. This isn’t Pete’s first rodeo: aside from last year’s pathetic failure, Pete did complete the challenge in 2016 with the novel which became the third published book in the Infernal Aether series: Beyond the Aether.
This year, Pete’s going to be writing a book which has been in plotting and development for some time: The South Sea Heist. He’ll be blogging on here with his observations and thoughts, and if you’re also doing NaNoWriMo and fancy buddying up / motivating him with gentle abuse, you can connect with him on the NaNo site: his handle’s Peter_Oxley
Until next time, as always…
Stay lucky!
Pete and Si
