It's 2009 and time for a new blog

Visit me at Bonnie's NaNoWriMo* 2009, my blog for this year.  Go take a look at it ... and leave me a comment, if you are so inclined.  Thanks.

NaNo '08 survey! $10 t-shirts!

Dear NaNoWriMo participant,

At the close of 2008, we convened a meeting of the Great NaNoWriMo Governing Council. Humans, hobbits, elves, and coffee shop owners from throughout the land gathered together, tasked with the mighty responsibility of forging our first-ever NaNoWriMo Participant Survey.

One month of feasting, singing, and catapult-rides later, the participant survey lay forgotten. We now know that pairing elves and espresso was a bad idea, and plan to do the whole thing very differently next year.

But because we really, really want your feedback on NaNoWriMo 2008, Lindsey and I sat down and made a survey ourselves last week. It has many multiple choice questions on it! It mentions ninjas! We're very proud of it.

Would do us the immense favor of filling it out? It'll take about ten minutes. We want to know what you liked about NaNo '08 and what you think we need to improve in '09. The whole staff a nd board will be reading through the surveys, so this is a great way for your voice to be heard. The deadline for survey response is Monday, February 2. Here's the link:

http://www.surveymonkey.com/s.aspx?sm=h6208B_2fPhGh72AEWyn2Viw_3d_3d

We're also excited to announce that we're throwing a $10 t-shirt sale in the Office of Letters and Light store. All NaNoWriMo, Script Frenzy, and OLL t-shirts (except for this year's NaNo Winner tee/sticker combo) are just $10 from now until February 2.

Check it out! http://store.lettersandlight.org/home.php?cat=6

Thanks so much for filling out our survey! I hope you're having an adventuresome 2009!

Chris
The Office of Letters and Light

NaNoWriMo wrap-up by Chris Baty

Wrestling polar bears

Dear Novelist,

Wow. We had a feeling this year's NaNo was going to be big. We just didn't realize it would be this big.

NaNoWriMo 2008 not only marked our largest turnout ever, we also had the highest percentage of winners we've seen since the year 2000, when I knew almost all 140 participants personally. Please drop by our blog and help us puzzle out the whys of this year's winning ways (or celebrate it with a Winner's shirt from our store!). Whatever magical forces were afoot this year, we collectively managed to write 1.6 billion words, demolishing last year's count by nearly 500,000,000 words.

With so much fiction produced, you might mistake National Novel Writing Month for a novel writing event. But we actually have a sneaky secondary mission that extends beyond books...and into your job.

(If you're still in school, please print this email out, seal it in an envelope, and read it on your first day at work.)

Okay. Jobs. Having a job is one of the greatest, trickiest things you can do as an adult. Employment brings perks like challenges and growth and (sometimes) money. But the longer you work at a job, the easier it is to confuse what you are doing with what you can do.

This is true whether you're a dental hygienist, a stay-at-home parent, or Sirkka-Liisa Anttila, the Forestry Minister of Finland. Because careers tend to be all about specialization. Human beings, on the other hand, contain multitudes. Each of us has a wealth of talents spread broadly over domains both marketable and deliciously impractical. The tricky part is that we tend to develop the former at the expense of the latter. Passions become hobbies. Hobbies become something we swear we'll get back to when we have more time. Or when the kids are grown. Or when the stock market recovers.

Which means we leave unexplored many of those paths that ultimately make us feel most alive—the moments of creating, building, playing, and doing that lead to extraordinary and unexpected things.

Like writing a book.

Or, more loosely, postponing the must-dos of the real world to spend 30 days exploring an attractive, improbable dream.

Giving ourselves that time is so important. Because the world can wait. It's what the world does best, in fact. It was hanging out for 4.5 billion years before we arrived, and it'll be waiting around for another few billion after we're gone.

Our dreams, however, have much shorter shelf-lives.

If there's one thing I've learned from running NaNoWriMo, it's this: Whatever you think you are, you are more than that. You possess a fearsome array of skills and abilities, and the most satisfying of these may be completely unknown to you now. Your curiosity is a dependable guide; follow it. Put yourself in unfamiliar places. Kindle passions. Savor the raw joy of making things, and then remake the best of those things until they take someone's breath away. Wrestle bears.

Actually, skip the bear-wrestling.

But do keep trying big things, okay? Sometimes we can wait so long for a clear sign that it's time to begin, that the opportunity sails right past us.

Life is so short. Adventures beckon. Let's get packed and head out on a new one today.

I think it's time.

Chris
NaNoWriMo

Post-event pep talk from Kelley Armstrong

Dear Fellow NaNo Writer,

So it’s all over. How’d you do? If you hit 50,000 words, congratulations! If you didn’t, and you gave it your best shot, congratulations! Whether you achieved the word count goal or not, you now have a brand new story. So what do you think of it?

When you reflect back on what you’ve written, you may be thrilled. You may be amazed at what you’ve produced. Or you may not... You may be disappointed. You may even feel like you’ve just wasted a month and an awesome idea. You haven’t. Trust me. I’ve been there.

I first did NaNo in 2005. I’d been hearing about it for years. By then, I was already published myself, but I thought it would be a great exercise for members of the online writing community I host on my message board. To truly support and encourage members, though, I needed to take the challenge alongside them. And I knew exactly what I wanted to write — the first draft of an idea I’d been toying with for years, that of a young adult story set in my Otherworld universe.

So I wrote that novel, called The Summoning, and this summer, The Summoning was released and made it onto the New York Times children’s best seller list. And that sounds so much more impressive if I don’t point out that the novel I wrote for NaNoWriMo is not the same version that was published.

What NaNoWriMo gave me was a quick and dirty first draft, and by the end of it, I could see that my book had some good stuff ... and it had some serious problems and missed opportunities. So I put it aside for a rest period and pondered how to fix it while I worked on my next contracted novel. The manuscript underwent significant revising, reworking and, yes, rewriting, before I let my agent take it to market.

If a multi-published author can’t expect to turn out a publishable first draft during NaNoWriMo, then neither should you. Of course, you could — some people do —but what NaNoWriMo has given you is at least two things you didn’t have on November 1.

The first reward will vary. Maybe you have a first draft you can work on. Or maybe you’ve realized that your idea wasn’t as novel-worthy as you thought. Or maybe, in the course of writing this book, you got an idea for another.

The last two may not seem as rewarding as the first, but they’re equally important. If you’ve been writing for a while, you probably have stories you’ve labored on for months, even years, before realizing the idea wasn’t novel-worthy. To hit that realization in a month frees you up to start something new without lamenting all the time you put into a story that didn’t work.

The second reward is one that every NaNoWriMo participant gets: one full month of writing practice. It’s a rare writer who publishes the first book they wrote — I didn’t — so practice is invaluable. And whether you dream of getting published or not, you have just spent a month discovering and exploring the joys of storytelling.

Oh, and in case you’re wondering, yes, I did hit 50,000 words this year. I just barely squeaked by with a win on Saturday, though. I can blame my near-miss on a month of book-touring and unexpectedly early edits, but I’m a full-time writer, so I really have no excuse for not hitting 50,000 words. For all of you who reached the goal words despite school or work or kids, I bow to you.

I’ll let you get back to your post-NaNo rest, right after I wish you good luck with your manuscript — this one or the next one. Because, even if you aren’t planning to edit this one, there will be a next one, right? I hope so. The world always needs more storytellers.

Kelley

Kelley Armstrong is the author of the Otherworld series. To learn more about her and her work, visit her website.

Week Four pep talk from Piers Anthony

Dear Writer,

You're a fool. You know that, don't you? Because only a fool would try a stunt as crazy as this. You want to write a 50,000 word novel in one month?! Do you have sawdust in your skull? When there are so many other more useful things you could be doing, like cleaning up the house and yard, taking a correspondence course in Chinese, or contributing your time and effort to a charitable cause? Whatever is possessing you?

Consider the first card of the Tarot deck, titled The Fool. There's this young man traipsing along with a small dog at his heel, toting a bag of his worldly goods on the end of his wooden staff, carrying a flower in his other hand, gazing raptly at the sky—and about to step off a cliff, because he isn't watching his feet. A fool indeed. Does this feel familiar? It should. You're doing much the same thing. What made you ever think you could bat out a bad book like that, let alone write anything readable?

So are you going to give up this folly and focus on reality before you step off the cliff? No? Are you sure? Even though you know you are about to confirm the suspicion of your dubious relatives, several acquaintances, and fewer friends that you never are going to amount to anything more than a dank hill of beans? That you're too damned oink-headed to rise to the level of the very lowest rung of common sense?

Sigh. You're a lost soul. So there's no help for it but to join the lowly company of the other aspect of The Fool. Because the fact is, that Fool is a Dreamer, and it is Dreamers who ultimately make life worthwhile for the unimaginative rest of us. Dreamers consider the wider universe. Dreamers build cathedrals, shape fine sculptures, and yes, generate literature. Dreamers are the artists who provide our rapacious species with some faint evidence of nobility.

So maybe you won't be a successful novelist, or even a good one. At least you are trying. That, would you believe, puts you in a rarefied one percent of our kind. Maybe less than that. You aspire to something better than the normal rat race. You may not accomplish much, but it's the attitude that counts. As with mutations: 99% of them are bad and don't survive, but the 1% that are better are responsible for the evolution of species to a more fit state. You know the odds are against you, but who knows? If you don't try, you'll never be sure whether you might, just maybe, possibly, have done it. So you do have to make the effort, or be forever condemned in your own bleary eyes.

Actually, 50,000 words isn't hard. You can write “Damn!” 50,000 times. Oh, you want a readable story! That will be more of a challenge. But you know, it can be done. In my heyday, before my wife's health declined and I took over meals and chores, I routinely wrote 3,000 words a day, taking two days a week off to answer fan mail, and 60,000 words a month was par. Now I try for 1,500 and hope for 2,000. That will do it. If you write that much each day, minimum, and go over some days, you will have your quota in the month. On the 10th of the month of August, 2008, I started writing my Xanth novel Knot Gneiss, about the challenge of a boulder that turns out to be not stone but a huge petrified knot of reverse wood that terrifies anyone who approaches it. Petrified = terrified, get it? And by the 30th I had 35,000 words. That's the same pace. If I can do it in my doddering old age—I'm 74—you can do it in your relative youth.

Of course you need ideas. You can garner them from anywhere. I noticed that our daily newspaper comes in a plastic bag that is knotted. The knot's too tight to undo without a lot of effort, so I just rip it open to get at the goodies inside. It's a nuisance; I wish they'd leave it loose. But I thought, maybe there's this cute delivery girl who has a crush on me, and she ties a love -knot to let me know. Not that at my age I'd know what to do with a real live girl, but it's still a fun fantasy. Okay, there's an idea. I could use it in my fiction. Maybe even in a Pep Talk. The mundane world has provided me with an opening. It will do the same for you, if you're alert.

Here's a secret: fictive text doesn't necessary flow easily. Most of the time it's more like cutting a highway through a mountain. You just have to keep working with your pick, chipping away at the rock, making slow progress. It may not be pretty at first. Prettiness doesn't come until later, at the polishing stage, which is outside your month. You just have to get it done by brute force if necessary. So maybe your ongoing story isn't very original. That's okay, for this. Just get it done. Originality can be more in the eye of the reader than in any objective assessment.

You can make it from a standing start, even from a foolish daydream when you should have been paying attention to the Pep Talk. You will want to try for a bit more quality, of course, and maybe a spot of realism. Garner an Idea, assemble some Characters, find a suitable place to start, and turn them loose in your imagination. Now go home and start your engines!

Piers

Piers Anthony is the author of the Xanth series. You can learn more about him and his work by visiting his website.
__________

Bonnie's note: Hey, you're a little too late for some of us, as you can see here:

My ship crossed the finish line

Oh, maybe that means we aren't the ones in need of a pep talk on the last day?

My ship crossed the finish line

When I got within about 127 words of reaching the goal of having a 50,000-word draft of my novel (which doesn't mean it's finished, of course), I furled the sails and waited. Then last evening I went off to our region's Big Push Write-In wearing a new t-shirt, given to me by my friend in honor of this momentous occasion. On the front of it are these words:
Careful, or you'll
end up in my novel
And there, among friends, I typed the last words needed to cross the line for NaNoWriMo's word-count goal. No, I didn't stand up and cheer and shout, but it was fun to share that time with them. Then I entered the word count in the meter at the top of my profile page, confusing the wrimo sitting next to me. Yes, it was deliberate -- because I wanted to see my word-count meter turn solid green. Then (and only then) did I put the **whole** kit and caboodle through the validator to see the meter turn gloriously purple with WINNER! across the face of it. Wanna see?


Or visit my Bookbuddybonnie profile page to read all about it.

Week Four Pep Talk From Nancy Etchemendy

Hi Writers!

It is a dark and dismal day. If the birds are singing, you can't imagine why, and you wish they would stop. You've taken a walk. You've taken a nap. You've sharpened all your pencils, even though you haven't written with a pencil since first grade. You've made yourself a cup of something hot to drink, but now it's cold. It got that way while you checked your email, and then your MySpace page, and then the "Things You Never Knew Existed but You Can't Live Without Them" website. You've cut your toenails. You've even brushed the dog. And still, you can't bring yourself to open the dreaded file that contains your novel and place your fingers on the keyboard.

STOP.

You've come to the right place. The NaNoWriMo people, in their wisdom, have supplied you with a stash of pep talks. Why do you suppose they would go to so much trouble? The answer is simple: because you have a lot of company, including me. Writing a novel is hard. At some point in the process, most novelists get bogged down, and it's perfectly normal. In fact, it's to be expected.

Okay, so now you know you're not alone. That's a relief. But the task of writing your way to a finished book still looms before you like the mountains of the moon, dark with mystery, and really, really high. So high, in fact, that the voice is whispering a new fear. You might actually expire before you get there, so why not just stop now?

Simple. Because you want to be a novelist. The difference between a novelist and someone who tinkers around with writing is this: novelists finish their books.

All well and good, you say. But how? How can you finish when you're pretty sure everything you've written so far is total garbage, you have no idea where you're going, and every time you look at the thing, you desperately want to go and do something else?

First, let's look at the question of whether you're writing something that belongs in the trash can. What you're working on right now is a first draft. Moreover, you're deliberately writing it at breakneck speed, which makes it a rough first draft. It's not going to be anywhere near publishable, nor should you expect it to be. I heard or read somewhere an observation by a gifted young novelist whose name escapes me now, for which I apologize. He said that a first draft is like a chunk of marble. It's a big, formless block. Later, you'll carve away the unnecessary bits, and you'll shape what's left into something beautiful. Michelangelo's Pieta was once a shapeless block, most of which ended up as dust on his studio floor. As you write, give yourself permission to create that formless block---the necessary first draft from which a wonderful book can spring.

Second, about not knowing where you're going. This will sound counterintuitive and maybe even crazy: don't worry about it. Think of your everyday self as a lost rider on the back of a powerful black horse. The rider may be freaking out. That's understandable. It's frightening to be lost. But your everyday self is not who creates the first draft. The first draft is written by the big black horse---your subconscious mind. That horse is smart, and it knows exactly where it's going. So trust it. It will get you home. Just write. Put down whatever feels right, even if it makes no sense to you. Don't think too much about it, don't hold the reins too tight, and soon you'll see your way again.

Third, regarding the desperate wish to go and do something else. Every writer has to deal with this. When the work is not going smoothly, the world fills up with inviting distractions. The great novelist and essayist Cynthia Ozick said, "A good citizen writer will put down her pen for a noodle pudding." I'm not sure about the good citizen part, but every writer I know is tempted to put down his or her pen hundreds of times during the course of a writing day. What kind of bird is that, calling from the tree outside? Has Uncle Harvey responded to your email yet? Wouldn't you be contributing more to the world if you were cleaning a toilet or eating a tuna fish sandwich?

No, dear novelist, you wouldn't be. The bird will wait. Uncle Harvey will wait. The toilet and the tuna will wait. You have something important to say, and you are saying it. That is your contribution, without which the world would be a poorer place, and it is one that only you can make.

Now, write!

Nancy

Read all about Nancy on her website here.
_________________________

"But the task of writing your way to a finished book still looms before you like the mountains of the moon, dark with mystery, and really, really high."


Yup, like these. Located somewhere on this little round thing: