Like a beating drum, the call of November goes out: “You, yes YOU, can write a book!”
And it’s true, you can. A “book” is a variable, actually — think of the “bible”, which is filled with “books”…well, which is it? Is the bible a book? Is Genesis a “book”? It’s only about 30,000 words (give or take), which by modern standards is more a novella.
There are industry standards, of course, and generally a book is over 50,000 words. Some publishers don’t think it is a “book” until 60k or 70k words, while most category romances (think Harlequin, Mills & Boon) are 30k to 40k.
My book Grieving Futures is about 15,000 words. My novel Wolves of Harmony Heights, which is still in editing, is 170,000 words. Pick your poison!
The idea of National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) is to write a “book” over the course of one month, November. The NaNoWriMo folks have determined that to be 50,000 words.
You can write 50,010 words by writing 1,667 a day for 30 days.
Yep. That’s all it takes.
In fact, Wolves of Harmony Heights was born as my NaNoWriMo entry for 2014. I wanted to write a story I would enjoy reading, and write it under my own name, and do it for fun. So I did.
(I did not do NaNoWriMo in 2015 because, honestly, I was spending much more time having panic attacks and doing EMDR therapy. Yeah, fun times. Let us never speak of this again….)
Anyway, I’m back on board! I’d say I’m back in black but eh, my entire wardrobe is black. I’ve signed up for NaNoWriMo to re-write and actually finish a very old project I put away years ago, Link in the Chain. I’ll write more about that later, but I do want to say that I’m excited about it. It’s revitalized and ready to roll!
If anyone is signing up and wants to buddy up, my NaNoWriMo Profile is http://nanowrimo.org/participants/kimboo.
Meet you there!
