November is National Novel Writing Month, and writers around the world are working toward a goal of finishing a 50,000 word rough draft of a manuscript during the month. They're keeping track of their progress and encouraging each other at the official NaNoWriMo website.
My local writing organization in Colorado, Pikes Peak Writers, is encouraging their members (like me) who don't have it in them to crank out that many words in one month to set an alternate goal and work toward that. They call their project NaNoTryMo and are offering a number of "write-ins" to get writers working together on their goals. See the PPW website for information.
I won't be participating in the official NaNoWriMo site, because I'm working on an existing manuscript versus starting a new one. But, I've set a goal of 20,000 additional words on my current manuscript for November. That's continuing at my current goal rate of 5000 words/week. I already have about 35,000 words written, so if I meet my NaNoTryMo goal, I'll be at 55,000 words at the end of November.
This manuscript is the third book in my RM Outdoor Adventures mystery series, titled Cataract Canyon. I need to finish the rough draft by mid-January, when I receive the galley proof for the second book, Wicked Eddies, to review & edit. So, I'm looking for motivation & encouragement to keep on cranking out those words! What will make meeting this goal especially hard is that I'll be touring November 11-18, cramming 8 events into that week to promote the trade paperback and ebook re-release of A Real Basket Case.
Are you a writer? Have you set a goal for yourself for November? What is it and what's your plan for reaching that goal? Are you working with a group of fellow writers so you can encourage each other? I hope so! Good luck to all of you NaNoWriMo and NaNoTryMo writers out there!
1 comment:
Your goals inspire me to do more! I'm sure you'll meet your word count even with the time you need to take to promote the re-release!
My November writing goals sadly don't contain much new material, which I'm starting to feel... Instead, I'm releasing a book of poetry next week, preparing 2 more books of poetry for publication and releasing them (well, at least one of the two in November, I hope), editing two short stories I recently finished, and editing a book of short stories I plan to release in December or early January. How do I plan to get all this done? One step at a time focusing first on the books of poetry and working on the short story projects when I can hopefully dedicating more and more time to the short story projects as the workload on the poetry books lessens.
I would like to also write at least a few words each day on my novel-in-progress, but I haven't figured out how to fit that goal in my schedule yet and stay on track with my other projects...
But it's all good!!
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