Happy Nanowrimo — think you can’t write a novel in a month?

Well, you can’t. Or at least I couldn’t.

But wait!

Nanowrimo is a fantastic way to get a rough draft of something done and it’s a wonderful way to experiment, to dare yourself to try to work with something impossible or wacky or both.

Take me and my forthcoming novel Pretend Plumber. My book comes out with Inlandia Books in April 2022, and it’s an amazing, funny, wild novel. My best ever. Magic, and mayhem, and spirits and self-discovery. And comedy!

Guess what? I wrote a draft of it during NanoWrimo a long time ago. This was a project that started out as a joke (long story). Then I thought, what the hell — maybe I’ll try to write it. So I did Nanowrimo. I wrote a bunch of words every day, like you do in NanoWrimo, and at one point near the end of the month, I just made up new characters and threw them into the story and did a bunch of weird stuff just to try to get to the word count.

I walked away from that November thinking, well, that was fun. Then a couple of years went by.

More than a couple.

I worked on other projects, and Trump got elected, and I began doing political organizing, and then the fall I turned 65, I thought remember that weird book I wrote during NanoWrimo? I wonder if it’s as bad as I remembered.

I opened it up in 2019 and thought well, alot of this is terrible, but the thing about the young girl…. that’s good!

I threw out the other stuff and concentrated on her. And that became my next novel.

Got an impossible project?

Got an idea for a novel that you told someone as a joke?

Nanowrimo is the place to write it.

Who knows?

Maybe your novel is next!

Sign up here: https://nanowrimo.org/

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