This is an email blast written by a monster.
I’m not even bothering this year. It never happens. You can talk about whatever you want on this thread, I’m depressed now. WHATEVER, I have my own website and my great-great-grandparents lived on a bog farm and only dreamed of being niche lady-bloggers.
If all the toasties played that game where someone starts a story and then other people continue it with a sentence, we’d probably have a novel by the end of the afternoon? I can start!
A beautiful girl stared out across the bog farm …
Thankfully it’s only six months until Nabokov’s birthday, AKA National Throw Your Novel in The Fire Day!
More like the PALE FIRE, am I right????
I’ve never read anything by Nabokov.
I cannot stop giggling at this.
Only 129 days until February 24th, or “Second part of Dead Souls burning” Day!
So your great-great grandmother was a niche bogger?
I just noticed the email address and now I can’t stop screaming
The novel waits at the base of your skull, tendrils threading through like purple-black mist, weaving itself between the folds of gray matter.
You begin to hear a faint echo behind your heartbeat. Or is it more of a thrumming noise?
November 1st approaches.
Your novel is JUMANJI.
It was a dark and stormy Movember when the cancer profiteers came to stay. We did not think much of them at the time, the cancer profiteers, for first they had come for the body with daffodils in spring, and who does not love a daffodil, and then they returned for breasts with pink, only the breasts and not the whole part, but the mammary glands alone, and we had no mammary glands but were down with them generally and were inclined to walk long distances in summer regardless. And then, finally, they returned in the season of loss and poppies, with their colon probes and wispy facial hair and the colour purple, all of which were deeply concerning, considering.
There is a pun in there about purple prose and poppy derivatives and first novels _about_ poppy derivatives by young men with wispy facial hair and also MRAs but it’s early.
I got this email too. It’s my first time trying NaNo and I’m beginning to be frightened at the personification of “my novel.” Like, if I fail to write it, is it going to haunt my dreams? Probably.
okay so I’m not the only one
So your novel wants to be rushed right?
“Dear Burgeoning Novelist,” huh? I love how our unwritten novels think we’re rapidly getting larger.
The syllabus for my senior capstone course in college would not stop referring to us as burgeoning sociologists, and it just kept making me think either of puberty, which is not a time I want associated with graduating from college, or that we were all about to basically Hulk out.
I got this same email and was like SERIOUSLY
That said, I think I’m going to try again this year; I’ve tried for like five years now, the furthest I got was… 20k words I think? Gonna keep trying, and my dude is writing too so we can encourage each other. We’ll see!
I’m in the 20k club with you! and am still going to try again this year. And by “try” I mean set a stretch goal of 30k and an I-will-be-satisfied-this goal of 20k and just aim to be writing things. Although now I am picturing an epistolary horror novel consisting entirely of messages from your unfinished or unstarted creative works. *shivers*
New Nanowrimo = National NO WRITING Month, amirite? Let’s make it happen, people!
Totally read that as “blog farmers.” YOUR VOCATION IS IN YOUR BLOOD
samesies
Oh God, this one upset me too. Stop guilting me, NaNoWriMo! I did it last year but haven’t touched my “novel” since November. So honestly, what’s the point?
I think I’m actually going to try it this year, even though I have always scorned it. I’ve got a plotline and a couple of fully-formed characters sitting in my head, and I’m basically just too paralyzed to write the inevitably shitty first draft that I will inevitably spend two years editing and then probably just delete entirely in a fit of rage.
…
There is a reason why the last time I wrote something other than an academic essay was in elementary school.
Ha, you have reminded me that you inspired me to try (and fail) again last year.
I’m pretty sure that I am on this email list, and did not get this email. Even NanoWrMo has given up on me.
I got this same email this morning, and promptly deleted it. Last October I confidently bought a cute journal in which to write down all of my ideas for the novel I was going to write, filled two pages, and then didn’t write a single word in November.
I feel so much better about NaNo now that I’ve blocked all of their twee-as-fuck emails …
This past April I “did” National Poetry Writing Month, but I tried to revise my expectations: I told myself to read a poem every day, and write one each week.
In fact I read roughly six poems a week in varying rhythms (one per day, two every day, six all at once) and wrote four poetical drafts, none of which will ever see the light of day.
I embrace my wild NaXXWriMo style and will dedicate this November to the reading of novels plus some nonproductive angsting about my dissertation. REVISED EXPECTATIONS.
P.S. NaXXWriMo = write femslash every day for a month?
This is a big year for me. I’ve graduated from reading the NaNo emails and deleting them regretfully to deleting them unopened with minimal guilt. Next year I may even unsubscribe.
By the first week of November, you will mark them as spam, but then glance shifty-eyed at your spam folder before deleting all.
Spurred by mindless rage at the flurry of emails the day before Thanksgiving (“we all have 4 work-free days at the end of November! Let someone else baste the turkey while you stuff your novel with delicious, juicy words!”) you will finally hit the unsubscribe link.
Thanksgiving day will be soporific even before you awaken. You will roll over in bliss, knowing that the word monster failed to eat you. Sweet dreams.
I get especially annoyed by the assumptions in those letters, where we alllllllll have the same evenings and weekends and national holidays off. Has no one at NaNo considered that many of their registered users don’t work 9 to 5 desk jobs?
I have never, ever managed to keep up with a NaNoWriMo schedule because, you know, life gets in the way and all that jazz, and I like sleeping more than I like sleeping less so I can cram some writing in. I think I finally unsubscribed from NaNo’s emails last year. Sleep is great.
After getting just a bit done in 2011, and 30K in 2012 (but I’d had 20K going in, so I pretended I won, because I am a cheating liarpantsafire), I was all set to ignore it this year. Deleting those emails unread and all.
But now my 8th grader is participating. Because school, whatever, plus apparently I inspired him. ugh! Whatever. I’m 10-14K into 2 different books, maybe I’ll get a lot done on one or another of them, but only because if I watch tv all night, my child will scold me. It’s bad enough that he makes me do the Toast workouts all the time, now he’s going to make me pursue my novelistic dreams?
I thought I procreated to have an excuse NOT to accomplish things (yes he’s 13, but I’m still carrying his baby weight, what of it?), but apparently it was so I would have a nagging external consciousness. BAD PLAN, Mel.
I decided to set a fanfic challenge for myself instead, and am going to try to write one short finished thing every day in November. (Shameless plug: I am looking for prompts.)
I’ve found the intensity of NaNoWriMo useful in the past, but I’m unlikely to tackle it again this year. I’ve been focusing on short fiction and long-form non-fiction lately, and (for me, for the moment) it’s more constructive to create more methodical writing habits than the frantic one-month tumble.
Wait. In that letter, they’re positing that my own novel called my unconscious mind labyrinthine? BUUUUUUUURN.
Look, I could write 50,000 words next month, but they would all be about the dogs I’ve found in my area on Petfinder that I want to adopt. 30,000 words about huskies. “Breathtaking!” says no one.
Actually that sounds wonderful. I probably would read that.
Huskies!
Look, I’m finishing up listening to Debo Mitford’s memoir on audiobook and she has AT LEAST 30,000 words about chickens, in every possible situation. I say go for it.
Look, I recently watched a show on Netflix called “Too Cute” that was about puppies and kittens being cute. I would read your words.
I heard about that show! My boyfriend told me about it, and we both scoffed with superior disdain for a tenth of a second before I had to admit that I totally want to watch that show.
Yeeeaaahhh, that show may have a season pass on my DVR.
I have come to the realisation that 1000 comfortable words a day is my pace and 50k in a month is not possible for me. Especially as I sometimes have to have a few days off here and there to sit in bed and cry.
So… no nano for me this year. It has been valuable for me in training me how to just *write* a first draft without getting frozen up in ‘it’s not good enough!’ terror but I’ve got everything from it that I need.
I have come to the realisation that 1000 comfortable words a day is my pace and 50k in a month is not possible for me. Especially as I sometimes have to have a few days off here and there to sit in bed and cry.
So… no nano for me this year. It has been valuable for me in training me how to just *write* a first draft without getting frozen up in 'it's not good enough!' terror but I've got everything from it that I need.
I feel like the odd lady out in this crowd on this one (not on the hate of that email, because seriously?) because I still get into NaNoWriMo. I’ve “won” 3 years, but never finished any of those novels. Not because the novels don’t have endings, but because I lose concentration after I’ve hit the win button.
Does anyone still like NaNo as a motivator?
I’ve gotten into a good, steady, writing-every-day pattern, and I’m going to use NaNo this year to work on my focus (working on one thing instead of just writing whatever comes to mind). So yeah, I think it can be motivating.
The surrounding culture can still get kind of insufferable, though.
I finished twice, years ago (once at the end of high school, once in my first year at university). Both novels were so terrible and I don’t even have copies of them any more. It was so pointless for me. The time would probably have been better spent underage drinking.