NaNoWriMo

If you've noticed that Owl and I have been even more radio-silency than normal, that's because of those four small syllables up top.

NaNoWriMo, or National Novel Writing Month, is a marathon writing event that takes place every November. Participants are challenged to write 50,000 in 30 days. Traditionally these 50,000 will all be part of one original novel, but not everybody does this. Owl, for instance, is working on two separate projects for NaNo. I'm writing a fictional bestiary (based off of drawings for Inktober, a similar challenge where participants draw an ink drawing for each day in October), which, although it has an underlying subplot, isn't really a novel per se. Some people write fanfiction, biographies, or a series of essays. The important thing is that we are all writing.

50,000 in 30 days sounds like a lot, but the reality is that this generally produces a fairly small novel. And few people really have a completed novel at the end of the month. However, as one of the prizes for winners (anybody who completes the challenge), the official NaNoWriMo organization offers a free print copy of your work, and several months to edit and format before submitting a copy for printing. I have a burning need to display a reference guide to fantastical monsters that I made up on my bookshelves with my name on it, so that's my goal for the month. 50,000 words. They don't have to be good. They don't even have to be spelled right. That's what editing is for. But they have to be there.

With that in mind, I am welcoming you all to challenge Owl and I. (Yes, Owl, I'm volunteering you for this as well.) It's a NaNo tradition for writers to challenge one another with dares, word wars, and other madness. A dare can be anything---write a whole paragraph without using the letter e, or an old NaNo favorite, write a scene that includes the "traveling shovel of death". A word war is basically a contest between two or more writers to see who can reach a certain word goal first. Crawls and sprints are among my favorite NaNo challenges. A sprint is pretty much what it sounds like. You write for a certain amount of time without interruptions---no Internet, no phone, no coffee breaks, no editing or second-guessing your word choice. You write constantly, and you write as much as you can, until you reach the finish line. Crawls are my personal favorite though. A word crawl walks you through a set of criteria, and presents you with a series of mini-challenges to be done in sequence. Take, for instance, the bookshelf world crawl Owl and I held at our apartment for a group of friends earlier this week. It began by asking participants to count the number of bookshelves in their home and multiplying it by 100. We have 8 bookshelves, so we wrote 800 words each. To make it more challenging, we made it a word war, so the first to 800 "won" (bragging rights), and we added a dare---a character must, in those 800 words, find a dusty box in an attic. (And, since I have bragging rights: I won! 800 words in 9.56 minutes. And I even spelled some words correctly.) The second leg of the crawl had us pick a shelf and count how many different book series we had on that shelf. Now, this challenge was made somewhat complicated due to the fact that Owl and I have begun to pack up our books for our eminent move, so we only had about 3 shelves worth of books left out, scattered around the 8 shelves. So we cheated a bit, and picked the shelf with all of my Terry Pratchett, which I couldn't bear to put away in boxes just yet, and counted each of his subseries (the City Watch books, the Witches books, etc). Eventually we decided on saying we had 7 distinct series, and according to the rules, multiplied that by 50. So we had a fairly easy stroll to 350 words, and moved on to the third leg, which included the option for one of my favorite challenges, the Fifty Headed Hydra. The Fifty Headed Hydra is a word sprint where the goal is to write 500 words in 5 minutes, so named by the famed creator of the Hydra. According to NaNo legend the first Hydra was successful, but of the 500 words, only three were spelled correctly: "fifty", "headed", and "hydra". (I want to read that novel.) The crawl continues in this fashion, and at the end of it I had doubled my total word count, though it took Owl and I three days to properly complete it. We next have our sights set on the Pokemon Gym Challenge, which we're hoping to start today, and which we are very excited for.

So, if you would like to challenge us to a dare, a sprint, a crawl, or whatever you want, please do! We could both use the help, and they're all a lot of fun.

You can find the forum dedicated to NaNo prompts, word wars, sprints, and crawls here, and some unofficial dares here, here, here, and here, or you can give us your own! (BP= bonus points, DBP= double bonus points, TBP= triple bonus points, etc. The points are Internet points and they can be redeemed for warm fuzzy feelings of pride.)

Now, I am behind on my word count, so I will leave this here. (And I'm only planning on counting this blog post towards my total word goal if I'm really desperate at the end of the month...) This will likely be the only blog post for November, so treasure it, or something. I'll be back in December to finish the harrowing (and now outdated) tale of my Mayo Clinic adventures.

Happy noveling, everybody. Give us challenges, and we will do our best to complete them!

Cheers,
Raven