Skip to main content

Buckle Up for This Year's NaNoWriMo!

NaNoWriMo Contest: National Novel Writing MonthHave you ever started a novel and gone short of accomplishing the task, cowed away by the sheer pressure and apprehension on the quality of your work? If so, NaNoWriMo is for you. This is the short for National Novel Writing Month. NaNoWriMo is a one-month long novel-writing program starting on November 1 and ending on the 30th. So, be sure to register free for the program before Oct 31.

Within those thirty days, you need to finish a novel up to 175 pages (50,000 words). The specialty of this program is that the quality of the work doesn’t matter; only the quantity does. You can submit any crappy novel of 50,000 words, if you want to win the game. It’s a program that exists there only to remove fear and apprehension from the minds of writers.

Since 1999 NaNoWriMo is here, allowing people to participate. Now, almost 300,000 participants have won the contest.

NaNoWriMo is only a jovial contest, without any prize. The only prize you get is an online certificate of your successful completion of a novel, but the real prize lies in your success over your fear of writing. Nobody is gonna check if you are actually writing a novel or copy-pasting hundred Wikipedia stories. The real fun lies in actually completing that difficult novel you have been thinking for over a year within a single month.

There are, however, rare instances when people got published through this program. Jon F Merz’s The Destructor, Lani Diane Rich’s Time Off for Good Behavior, etc., are examples of them.

If you have been cowed by the deadlines of finishing a novel, then that’s why you should write on NaNoWriMo. It’s just a month to spare, every year, and you can show the world if you can keep the deadlines or not. So far, the results show that only 15 per cent of the people participating in the program have been able to cross the word count threshold. So, the competition is much reduced. Out of these 15 %, how many writers write great novels, we don’t know.

Anyways, go ahead, readers, give it a try. If you don’t want to write, still you can be part of this great program by volunteering to be a municipal liaison. Read this to know more about this.

Copyright © Lenin Nair 2008

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

En Dash, Em Dash, and Hyphen

We have three types of dashes in use: The hyphen, En Dash, and the Em Dash. In this post, we will see how to use them all correctly. Hyphen (-) The hyphen is the minus key in Windows-based keyboards. This is a widely used punctuation mark. Hyphen should not be mistaken for a dash . Dash is different and has different function than a hyphen. A hyphen is used to separate the words in a compound adjective, verb, or adverb. For instance: The T-rex has a movement-based vision. My blog is blogger-powered. John’s idea was pooh-poohed. The hyphen can be used generally for all kinds of wordbreaks . En Dash (–) En Dash gets its name from its length. It is one ‘N’ long (En is a typographical unit that is almost as wide as 'N'). En Dash is used to express a range of values or a distance: People of age 55–80 are more prone to hypertension. Delhi–Sidney flight was late by three hours. In MS Word, you can put an En Dash either from the menu, clicking Insert->Symbol or by the key-combinatio...

Unethical Business Practices by Associated Content (AC)

Useful Resources Freelance job at Constant Content Freelance for a 6 figure income Get paid to write on the Internet 25 Ways to write for income on the Internet Work from home as a virtual assistant Freelance for fortune 500 companies Today’s Internet slogan is ‘Content is King’ . If you have well-written, keyword rich content, without grammatical errors, then you can rank very high on search engine results, thus making a lot of money. With this business idea, several companies have sprung up, and Associated Content (who call themselves, People’s Media Company) is one among them. Here, we will try to find answers to these questions: 1. What exactly is Associated Content (if you don’t already know this)? 2. Is it really worthwhile to work with them? 3. Why should you steer right clear of them? What is Associated Content (AC) Associated Content (AC) is a website, in which you can earn money submitting content (text, video, audio, or images) . Anyone from anywhere in the...

Power of Short Sentences

Post dedicated to Thomas Hardy (see History Today below). There are monster sentences like the one you encounter as the first paragraph of Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens . One of my friends, whom I am getting equipped for his IELTS ( what is this? ), told me that the examination recommends long sentences. In writing classes also, I guess it’s longer sentences most tutors promote. But indubitably shorter sentences are more powerful . We will see why. Take a long sentence for instance: Tom Cruise, one of the finest actors in the whole world, is perhaps the most powerful celebrity to exist ever according to Time Magazine, but many people still dispute this fact and point out that there are more powerful and popular actors than Cruise, though they were unsuccessful in providing the total number of fans, who liked the films of those actors. This is a long sentence and it is very confusing . Though it has a logical construction and conveys a meaning, it falters in many occasions and seems ...