We’ve been doing it since before Jane Austen. Girls writing fiction. So in the 2016 National Novel Writing Month, I’m going to guess that a majority of the more than 400,000 participants this year are women. And many will go on to publish their books. Some NYT bestsellers by women that began as NaNoWriMo exercises:
- Water for Elephants by Sara Gruen, published by Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill[32]
- The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern, published by Doubleday[33]
- Persistence of Memory by Amelia Atwater-Rhodes, published by Delacorte Press[32]
- Fangirl by Rainbow Rowell, published by St. Martin’s Press[34][35]
- Anna and the French Kiss by Stephanie Perkins, published by Dutton Juvenile[34][36]
- Cinder by Marissa Meyer, published by Square Fish[34]
My work-in-progress, The Romantics Club, is a third of the way, if you estimate it by words count. I’m now more than 20,000 words (and 85 pages) drafted on an 85,000-word (goal) novel of roughly 335 pages. That’s about the count for my completed novel (available to an interested publisher), The Renaissance Club. And I didn’t do it with a quill and ink. Thank goodness for the digital age!
Visit https://racheldacus.net for more information and writing by Rachel Dacus.