Saturday November 1st is the start of the annual National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo). This is where writers across the country try to write a novel with at least 50,000 words by November 30th. This year I plan to participate for the first time. In connection with the project and to help sell my previous book, if you write a review for it, I will use your name in a future story. It’s win-win.
National Novel Writing Month, shortened as NaNoWriMo (na-noh-RY-moh), is an annual internet-based creative writing project that takes place during the month of November. NaNoWriMo challenges participants to write 50,000 words of a new novel from November 1 until the deadline at 11:59PM on November 30. The goal of NaNoWriMo is to get people writing and keep them motivated throughout the process. To ensure this, the website provides participants with tips for writer’s block, local places writers participating in NaNoWriMo are meeting, and an online community of support. The idea is to focus on completion instead of perfection. NaNoWriMo focuses on the length of a work rather than the quality, encouraging writers to finish their first draft so that it can later be edited at the author’s discretion. NaNoWriMo’s main goal is to encourage creativity worldwide. The project started in July 1999 with just 21 participants, but by the 2010 event over 200,000 people took part – writing a total of over 2.8 billion words.
I had started my next collection of short stories but have recently been bogged down. In need of a boost, I decided to participate in NaNoWriMo. Although I am not writing a novel – or not expecting to – the event can help me create some stories for my next book and/or future writing contests I might enter. If an idea seems strong enough I might turn it into a script.
In July 2013, I published my first collection of short stories “Dancing in the Banana Factory“.
Shockingly (to me – HA!) I sold some copies but as yet no one has written a public review for it on the many sites it can be purchased.
So in conjunction with my NaNoWriMo project, if you write a public review of my book, “Dancing in the Banana Factory”, before December 1st 2014, I will use your first or last name for a secondary character in a short story or novel I write in the near future.
Since I may not know you personally, I won’t be trying to make such a character to be just like you so any resemblance will be coincidental – really.
Of course I have no way to verify if you actually read my book so I am doing this on the honor system. The review, good or bad, must be more than a paragraph and bonus points if you use specific examples from any of the stories in the collection except the first one since it is available for a free preview.
Don’t worry about letting me know when you write one as I will check out the various sites that sell the book and look for reviews.
My Published Writing page gives more info about my book and links to the websites that sell it.
Thanks and wish me luck.
