Sure is! The good folks at NaNoWriMo have fully embraced us so-called rebels at least, since we have official badges and a subforum and everything :D

Best of luck to you!

I did it two years ago, but since I do a lot of writing here on RPoL, I really don't see anything to be gained by doing it again.

I've debated doing it every year for a while now. Years ago I pretty much rode, worked, and wrote daily. Then Life disrupted everything for quite a while, and then middle age lethargy set in. Part of the reason I got back into gaming was to try to kick-start my creativity again; I was massively frustrated with being creatively passive (reading as much as a book a day, watching videos; fun, but totally passive) and couldn't seem to focus myself on writing.

Gaming has definitely helped. I've been digging my game world back up, bit by bit, putting what parts I've found so far into the computer.  I've re-read the chapters I have print copies of from the nearly finished novel I'd written back when -- and working on setting up that world as a place to do a free-form game here has helped me to really quantify parts of it that hadn't even come up in the novel's first draft.

So, still trying to transcribe it back onto the computer, and re-write the missing chapters based on the fragments I can remember... but my ability to focus remains as lousy as my ability to get out and ride. Which amounts to not being certain I can buckle down and give this a serious go -- and failing means becoming even more frustrated and unhappy with myself about it. :/

Well, that's part of the advantage of NaNoWriMo... you can connect with one or more buddies to kick you in the keister if you need it. Plus, depending on where you live, you can meet up with others involved and do spurts and stuff.

The other thing to keep in mind is that you can't actually LOSE doing this. Not reaching the goal isn't as important as making the effort. While the goal is supposed to be 1600+ words per day, not every day goes the way you want. So you can set different goals for yourself. When I did it, there were days that I just didn't have the time or mental energy to do it, but after three bad days, I'd get a good one that allowed me to get caught up.

Then there's the Thanksgiving Day weekend (if you live in the United States), which is why it's set in November in the first place. Turkey day comes at the end of the month, and most people don't have to work, so that's the homestretch to hammer out those last few thousand words.

Anyway, there's a lot of help from the site to get your creativity flowing again. You don't have to be Stephen King (who can purportedly write a complete novel in a weekend) or James Patterson (who seems to write one a month).

If I can get the chapters I have actually typed in, I'd be helping myself quite a bit with that alone. I live on the edge of nowhere, so there's no Net at my house, and I'm seriously shy in RL -- as in, panic attack shyness at the notion of approaching a group of strangers. :P

But, I do work at a high school, and the librarian pushes NaNoWriMo every year, so I'd have direct support there. (Especially seeing as I work in the same department & she's now my supervisor.)

And yep, there's Thanksgiving weekend. No local relatives means hooking up with a couple other friends for the day, but the rest of the weekend is free.

So, maybe I'll talk to my librarian about it tomorrow. :)

Remember, you don't need to be online to write! As Iammara said, it's not about quality so much as quantity. Just sit down and right. It doesn't matter where the story goes... we had a writing exercise in college where you took a roll of paper and stuck it in the typewriter (yeah, I'm that old!) and then you just type... what was called stream of consciousness. It doesn't matter where it goes... talk about your dog, your house, a teacher you had a crush on, your favorite sport/team, when you went to the zoo, summer camp, best pizza you ever had, etc.

It's a lot easier with a computer, and if you have a laptop/tablet, you can do it anywhere.


I'm rather shy, too, but once you make contact with someone from the local NaNoWriMo support group on the internet, they aren't strangers any more.

When you hook up with a buddy, you can actually have several buddies. You can find one that's doing the same type of novel you are doing--scifi, mystery, cozy, fantasy, hard-boiled detective, etc.


The bottom line is: if you want to do it, YOU CAN DO IT!

I did it last year, and only made it about halfway, but I still found it helpful. When it started, I considered it a productive day if I wrote about 300 words in an hour. Setting a target of roughly 1700 words a day made me really stretch myself. I think by the time it was done, I was capable of clocking just around 1000 words an hour.

I plan to try again this year. Whether I make it or not, I find it a helpful thing to do. I haven't really relied on having a system of friends to motivate me, but having the set time period and the goal gamifies it enough to serve as motivation.

Well, we'll see what happens... I signed up. Hopefully I'll figure it out before it officially starts. :)

I want to.

But I need to also, at some point, focus on ongoing works rather than start a new one :D

Would it be cheating if I had notes on an idea prior to starting the actual writing in November?

In reply to jtcbrown (msg # 11):

I think you can do pretty much whatever you want.  Unless you are 'competing' with someone else, you make your own rules.

They actually encourage this one. There's a badge specifically for people who have outlines, and a badge for people who write by the seat of their pants (like I do). The only rules that you're supposed to follow (supposed to, mind you, but don't have to) is that you don't begin the writing before November 1, and that you finish before December 1.

Actually, it isn't really that you don't start before Nov. 1, only that you only count what you write after that. You can have 2 chapters written before that, but they wouldn't count towards your goal. It's more about writing and finishing.

The same thing applies to your plot or story ideas or even an outline. They don't expect you to be coming up with all of that on the fly.

There are other things you can do, too, besides just story. You can write up a one-or-two sentence description about the characters you use, and even those can be modified over the course of the month. You write up area descriptions, or place descriptions. It's about WRITING during the month, not necessarily about WHAT you write.

It's an honor system anyway. If you claim writing that you did before November 1, you're only cheating yourself. You're not writing online--your writing on  your computer.

The bottom line is that you get from it what you put into it. You can participate on the online workshops, meet with local support organizers, or just get together with other writers in your area. It's about promoting your writing efforts.

I'm planning to take part in NaNo this year. I published an epic fantasy novel that I wrote during NaNo in 2014 and I'm planning to write book 2 of the series this year.

Good luck to all NoNoWriMoers this year! I did it in 2014 and 2015 and found it to be a great challenge. Achievable if real life doesn't get too in the way, but definitely not a gimme, either.

Whether or not you make it to 50000 words, it's a great to have a goal and have some resources out there to help. If you are thinking about it, I say it's definitely worth a try!

I think I've seen a thread for this every year since I joined RPOL. Every year I think 'oh, that's cool.' This year I actually signed up. Not sure how close I'll get to 50,000 but with nothing to lose, why not try.

I wrote three lines of notes over the weekend. I think I'm ready...

In reply to Agent 0013 (msg # 17):

You can do it! NaNo is mostly about perseverance. ^_^ Just keep swimming writing.

I'm not doing it this year. Between work craziness, some home maintenance that needs doing, and some other stuff happening, I'm not going to be doing Nano.

Well, we're about 1/3 of the way through the month now. How's everyone coming along thus far? =D

I'll admit, I'm absolutely destroying my daily word count every day, but I've also got a lot of free time on my hands too.

I got gunned down right out of the gate... got called on the second that I was going to be losing my house. Landlord can't manage his finances w/o his wife. She was my original landlord and a friend, but we lost her to brain cancer less than 2 years ago.

So, I've been preoccupied with figuring out alternate housing... tentatively aiming to buy again. I'll find out this weekend. Meantime, while I don't have a deadline yet, there's still packing to do....

I'm a little sluggish. I've been managing some words per day but I'm short of my goals right now.

I'm already way behind. At this point I think I'll be happy if I make it to the halfway point.

On the bright side, I think I've managed to carve out a portion of my day that I can devote to writing even beyond this month, it just isn't anywhere near long enough to keep up with these goals.

Perhaps some sort of plan going in would have been a good idea, instead of checking out the website on Oct. 30th and thinking it looked like a good idea.

Ah, well. That's how it goes sometimes.

I waited to the last minute to sign up for this year, and managed one day of writing so far. Most of my time/writing is spent on the games I run here on RPoL.

I'm kind of  hoping I might get caught up this week, but these days, I seem to write a lot slower than I think I should or use to.

I'll probably have to just skip posting one day and write.

In reply to StarMaster (msg # 24):

I signed up to push myself to do more creative writing than before, and it's been successful at that so far. I've been counting IC posts towards it as well, pasting copies at the bottom of the document. The rest would never get published, so it's more practice and fun than anything.

Perhaps once I no longer have a word goal I'll dig out one of my many incomplete novels and see if I can complete any of them. Many started, none finished. I'm sure there are others in this thread who can relate to that!

I can't even imagine what my word count would look like if I included all my IC posts this month for my wordcount. >_> I mean, I already finished, but I post like a madman sometimes.

In reply to Tyr Hawk (msg # 26):

Heh. I know what you mean. I'm not running as many characters as I once did, but at my peak I can only imagine... So far today I haven't been able to make an IC post.