It’s NaNoWriMo Time!

I’m a day late with this post. To be honest, I didn’t decide until late Wednesday night that I would be participating in NaNoWriMo this year.

I know a lot of you know what NaNoWriMo is, but there are probably a lot who don’t.

November is National Novel Writing Month. It was started in 1999. In 2005, they became a 501(c)3 not-for-profit organization.

Here is a little bit about NaNoWriMo (or NaNo for short):

National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) believes stories matter. The event began in 1999, and in 2005, National Novel Writing Month became a 501(c)(3) nonprofit. NaNoWriMo’s programs now include National Novel Writing Month in November, Camp NaNoWriMo, the Young Writers Program, Come Write In, and the “Now What?” Months.

Last year, NaNo had some pretty impressive numbers.

• 402,142 participants, including 95,912 students and educators in the Young Writers Program, started the month as auto mechanics, out-of-work actors, and middle school English teachers. They walked away novelists.

• 972 volunteer Municipal Liaisons guided 646 regions on six continents.

• 1,195 libraries, bookstores, and community centers opened their doors to novelists through the Come Write In program.

• 65,962 Campers tackled a writing project—novel or not—at Camp NaNoWriMo.

And lest you think it’s just a vanity exercise to see if you can do it (50,000 words in one month is a lot for some people and not-so-much for others):

Hundreds of NaNoWriMo novels have been traditionally published. They include Sara Gruen’s Water for Elephants, Erin Morgenstern’s The Night Circus, Hugh Howey’s Wool, Rainbow Rowell’s Fangirl, Jason Hough’s The Darwin Elevator, and Marissa Meyer’s Cinder.

But, really, this just scratches the surface of all that NaNo is. To learn more about it, I encourage you to visit the site and poke around in the “about” section. If you want to try it, leave your NaNo username in the comments here and I’ll add you as a writing buddy.

I’ll see you tomorrow. I have some writing to do.