Well, I'm here to report that I did not win the National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) challenge, although some of my writing buddies did. Congratulations Jody Casella and SR Cardell, and Connie Hebert. Your fingers must be throbbing!
I did manage to knock out 26,000 or so, which was enough to get a few first draft chapters of a book that was rattling around in my head for awhile. I encourage all writers to join this great challenge. It pushes you to write without worrying about fixing things.
Did I say without worrying? That's not totally true. The hardest thing for me to do was to plow through the words, watching my errors and poor dialog fall behind me...waving at me, and calling for me to fix them.
The challenge is to keep writing no matter what, and go back and fix the problems after the first draft is done. Typos? Ignore them. It's the amount of words that count, not the quality of the work. The premise is that you should be able to pry a decent novel out of the mess at some point.
In the end, I know I have a lot of stuff that will have to be thrown out, but did write some stuff that made me say...Hey, that's not bad!
