5 Places to Nano – and How to be Kind

Before you start deciding where you want to go to NaNo, you need to consider what you need from the place you’re going to NaNo. For me, I need food and drinks – I prefer the convenience of purchasing something there vs bring something with me, wifi – updating my word count as I go…

Small Victories Friday

I am editing Shenanigans for probably the seventh or eighth ( and hopefully final) time – and I don’t mean seven or eight drafts. I edit in ‘batches’, so I’ll edit two or three ‘drafts’ of the same book each time I edit. Then I need a break from the book. All of this in…

Back to school…

I’m hoping that means back to routine for me. Like most children, I function better with a routine, but somehow, even after decades of practice being an adult, I am incapable of creating a routine for myself without an outside influence – like school. Getting out of bed in the morning is hopeless, if I’m…

NaNo 2018

Is anyone else already thinking about NaNo? A little? I feel like even though NaNo is technically thirty days, it creeps into my thoughts for roughly six months of the year. There are three or so months of ‘planning’ – tossing around random ideas that would work for a NaNo novel. The months of, “Haha, you…

Writing in emojis…

Is that the official plural of emoji? I’m not sure and it’s not an easy thing to Google. I also find myself trying to use ‘lol’ and the like, rather than writing out the lol. I can’t tell if it’s that I give myself permission to be lazy with my November writing, or if it’s…

The spirit of NaNo

As November comes to a close I can either panic at how far behind I am, or I can reflect. This year, I’m choosing to reflect. In the Facebook group for my NaNo region, someone mentioned that though they knew they wouldn’t ‘finish’ this year, they were still grateful for the progress they had made….

Halfway gone…

Today marks the halfway point of NaNoWriMo. It’s right around now every year that I look back at the absolute drivel I’ve written, the sporadic bursts of writing, the typo-ridden document I lovingly call a novel and start to wonder- Is it worth it? Is it worth a mostly wordless December? A January fraught with…

Happy NaNo Day!

And, we’re off! It’s day one of NaNo and I, for one, am still feeling optimistic about the next thirty days. I mean, I did already realize that I forgot about two days I probably won’t be able to write, but that’s why I gave myself an extra, right? So it’s only the one day…

The plotser. The plantser. Whatever.

Are you a planner or a pantser? Hmm? As NaNo approaches, inquiring minds want to know. I’m neither. And I’m both. I’m a plotser. I can’t go in blind or I write utter gibberish, drifting from one topic to the next until even I don’t know what genre I’m writing or why the mouse has…

NaNoWriMo Prep

Of course I’m doing NaNo this year. I always do NaNo and I always do the inevitable march toward brain death and then write an impossible number of words on the last day to make up for the days I was really busy  was lazy didn’t get any writing done  wasn’t able to write. And then I’m…