A.E. Howard

October 5, 2012

Who’s Doing #NaNoWriMo? We Are!

Howdy gang! I hope you’ve had a great summer and are enjoying the new season. Fall came rushing in on me and I can hardly believe next month is November!

Join Us During November

Anna and I are doing #NaNoWriMo next month and we hope you are, too! If you aren’t signed up yet, go to http://nanowrimo.org and do it now.

We had a heck of a lot of fun last June doing word sprints with you guys. Because of that, we’re bringing it all back during November to help support your NaNoWriMo experience. Follow @junowrimo on Twitter to join in. I’m excited about seeing all my JuNo buddies again.

Remember our word count spreadsheet from June? How cool was it to see everyone’s daily counts? Did you have as much fun racing with your fellow WriMos as I did? I have good news. We’re bringing it back for NaNoWrimo.

We will have a post letting you know when the new spreadsheet is ready, so stay tuned. We had over a hundred people input their names this June. Let’s see if we can get even more next month. Make sure you’ve created a JuNoWriMo account which will grant you access to the spreadsheet.

The best part about this site is the accountability. NaNoWriMo is a big place and it can be hard to get to know people, but here you’ll find a smaller and tighter community. If you’re new, then welcome aboard! We’re happy to have you with us.

Getting Ready for NaNoWriMo

Are you prepped and ready for what it’s going to take to write a novel in thirty days? October is prewriting month and I encourage you to take advantage of it. Starting NaNoWriMo without a plan isn’t just difficult—it’s setting yourself up for failure. Get the bones of your novel sketched out ahead of time so that when the clock turns midnight on October 31^st, you’re armed and ready.

What is prewriting and exactly how do you do it? Aaron Pogue has a great walkthrough of how to get ready to write a novel. This post is the first in the prewriting series. Follow his advice and you’ll be ready for November.

More Tips and Free Stuff

One final thing. I’ve saved the best for last. There’s a great new ebook out there called @WriMo: A 30-day Survival Guide for Writers by Kevin S. Kaiser. I highly recommend it for everyone doing NaNoWriMo. This book is full of motivation to inspire your writing journey. It’s especially useful for making you stick with it in those times you really don’t want to write. I read it and loved it. Even better, all the proceeds of the book are donated to NaNoWriMo which means that buying this book is akin to sending them a donation check.

I’m so excited about this book that I’m going to give away a free copy next week! Come back on Monday for a chance to win!

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Prewriting for JuNoWriMo

Prewriting: the Steps

So Many Choices, So Little Time

July 5, 2012

June 2012 Is Over–What’s Next?

After a whirlwind of a month, June is finally over. For some of us the end of the month is met with shouts of joy and relief and for others it’s received with a few tears and sighs of nostalgia. You might be wondering, “What on earth do I do now?”

JuNoWriMo Stats

This was our (Anna’s and my) first year hosting this event, and it was even bigger than we’d anticipated. Was JuNoWriMo 2012 a success? Most definitely! We started spreading the word around April, but even with only a few short months to drum up excitement, we had a great turnout this year. Here’s the breakdown: Continue reading “June 2012 Is Over–What’s Next?”

June 11, 2012

Pep Talk Week 2: When Your Novel Talks Back

Before I won my first novel-in-a-month challenge, I had been writing novels for at least 10 years. Or, perhaps, almost writing them would be a better way to put it. I would start them and somewhere between the 1/3 and the 1/2 way mark, I would suddenly become gripped with the conviction that this was a terrible story. No one would want to read it, I should delete it and burn all my notes so that no one could every associate such a sophomoric, poorly written story with me.

And then one year, I won a novel-in-a-month challenge by doing one simple thing.

Okay, two simple things really.

I refused to read anything I’d written except for perhaps a paragraph or two to get me going again.
I refused to stop.

Both are easier said than done. The temptation to peek is insane! But don’t. Nothing will kill your story faster than reading it right now. So don’t do it!

And then, refuse to stop. Because chances are sometime this week, your story is going to get all self-conscious and it’s going to start talking to you.

In the middle of week two that fateful November when I finally wrote a novel I could finish, I distinctly remember having this conversation multiple times with my novel.

Continue reading “Pep Talk Week 2: When Your Novel Talks Back”

June 4, 2012

Pep Talk Week 1: Getting Started with a Bang

Author pic bw It’s week one, and our collective adrenaline is probably enough to light a small city right now.
Welcome to JuNoWriMo Week 1!
I’m sure we’ve all started our novels with at least two thousand words at the kick-off party after weeks and weeks of careful plotting and pre-writing, with pages of notes and plot points hung carefully by our computers.

Right?

Or maybe not.

For those of you who’ve done that, congrats! Way to go! Keep it up 🙂

If you’re like me though, you’ve got maybe a decent word count from the past few days and a handful of notes scribbled down somewhere.

Then what’s in the picture you ask?

Oh, that. Well, that’s the timeline and plot sheets from my LAST novel, you know the one that’s almost done.

I confess that while I have the general idea of where this novel is going, I don’t have it concretely sketched out. At all. I didn’t the last time either.

Continue reading “Pep Talk Week 1: Getting Started with a Bang”

March 17, 2012

Welcome to JuNoWriMo

This is it, folks—the real deal! Our blog is finally live, thanks to Anna, who has done an amazing job. Isn’t it lovely? *swoon*

All Aboard for Adventure

If you’re new to June Novel Writing Month, don’t fret–we all are! This is a first-time adventure for all of us, and you can bet it won’t lack in the area of excitement. (If you’re curious about what JuNoWriMo entails, go here to read about it.)

We are both big fans of (and participants in) NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month). We’re not trying to do it better than them. We’re not trying to get you to stop doing NaNo and join JuNoWriMo. It doesn’t work that way. We’re all on the same team here, just one other organization cheering for you as you write your book. I don’t know about you, but I’ll be writing my second book of the year in November.

Since coming up with the idea of JuNoWriMo, I’ve heard of several other programs that are doing the same thing – challenging you to write 50,000 words in June. Our take on that is—great! That just means there are more writers out there to support each other. If you’re participating in one of the other events, feel free to join ours as well. You can count your words for both. This isn’t an exclusive relationship. We’re not trying to compete with anyone, just create our own little community. Continue reading “Welcome to JuNoWriMo”