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Self-publishing Your NaNoWriMo Book

Self-publishing your NaNoWriMo book may be easier than you think — and take a lot longer than you expect. The above novels took me an average of one year to draft and another year to edit and polish, develop cover art and marketing materials, and launch. They each required an investment of money and time, and of the two, time was the more expensive investement — well beyond the month of November.

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National Novel Writing Month & Choosing a Book Idea

National Novel Writing Month We’re in the international month of goal-oriented novel writing called National Novel Writing Month, or as some of us veterans call it, NaNoWriMo. I’m not in a place to race into the many words of a new novel. I’m working toward finishing edits on my next, Undoing Time, the story of a privileged young woman who winds up time traveling as a spy for the American Revolution, with the help of…

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Being a NaNoWriMo Rebel

I’m a born rebel, so when I set goals as a NaNoWriMo rebel, I pick the ones that fit with my writing habits. These are habits born of observing my best writing periods and replicating what worked, forgetting what didn’t. For me, as a National Novel Writing Month fan, word counts don’t work. For me, daily writing works. But you may be a different kind of writer. How can you use NaNo to your advantage?…

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NaNoWriMo in Writing Women’s Fiction

NaNoWriMo for women’s fiction writers seems like an oxymoron. Writing about women and their relationships requires careful, deep creativity. National Novel Writing Month urges speed and volume of words. As a writer of upmarket, magical realism fiction, I’ve nevertheless found NaNoWriMo invvaluable. It’s helped me build my craft and my writing life in several ways. I’ve done NaNoWriMo in writing women’s fiction three times now. It has helped me build skills of endurance and belief…

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A 30-day, Part-Time DIY Writing Retreat

I’m beginning a new DIY writing retreat! Heading down a new path of revising my draft of Novel #2 – better known as The Romantics, a story of two half-sisters and the cottage they inherit in Italy, along with its resident ghost. It was drafted last year during National Novel Writing Month, (NaNoWriMo) a month-long writing marathon in which you commit to write 50,000 words of a new book. Are you jumping into this national…

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50,000 Words in 30 Days — Surviving the NaNoWriMo Marathon

It was quite a thing, writing 50,000 words in 30 days. I signed up telling all my colleagues I wouldn’t cross the finish line, that I had no intention of it. I wanted to write good words, not fast and plenty words. But guess what? I have a giant competitive streak in my nature. Every day when I checked my writing buddies’ progress, a few pulled ahead, of me. It got under my skin. I…

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Day 18 of National Novel Writing Month – Not Yet Halfway

It’s a marathon: 50,000 words of prose, the majority of words for an 80,000-word standard mainstream novel. I’m at a little over 24,000 words this morning. Why am I doing this? Because writing is bliss and marketing a book is hell. Undergoing the process of trying to get a literary agent, who then tries to get your book a publisher, who then takes more than a year to publish it — that’s anyone’s definition of…

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Gaining Momentum in Novel Writing Month – Wheeeee!

Update on my #NaNoWriMo2016 — today I wrote over 3,000 words. It helps to be doing a lot of scene-setting in an exotic location, which for my book is the picturesque Ligurian coast of Northern Italy. It also helps that I love writing descriptions of scenery and towns. I love researching places I’ve been or been near. I spent time in Santa Margherita and Portofino, and the little town where I’m setting my book is…

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Day Ten of National Novel Writing Month

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…

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National Novel Writing Month — I jumped in with sisterhood

I did it. I signed up to write 50,000 words in the month of November. Partly, I did it because I’m writing a new novel, The Romantics Club, about two half-sisters who inherit a cottage in Italy and along with it, the ghost of the poet Shelley. I wanted something to distract me from two inevitabilities: death, this one my beloved brother’s; and waiting to hear about my completed manuscript, in this case from agents…

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