That’s right, it’s November. And some of us know what that means… NaNoWriMo! NaNoWriMo stands for National Novel Writing Month. During the month of November, you are striving to write daily and surpass your word goal.
I know that as of last year, the adult goal was 50,000 and the kids had a typing test, but I also know that this year they reorganized the kids version (officially the Young Writer’s Program) and are using this year as a Beta test for it. That said, I’m very impressed with the editing they’ve done, making it possible to write the story on the website instead of copying and pasting your exterior document into the word count box. They’ve also added a feature allowing kids to do an independent challenge at any time of the year, not just the official one in November. Again, I have no knowledge on whether the adults have this privilege.
I’ve been doing NaNo since I was 8, with the exception of last year (we were visiting relatives out of town for Thanksgiving). It wasn’t my first NaNo, but my second that actually got edited and (self-)published.
My advice to you if you choose to do this any time in the future is that you don’t have to get it right the first time. A lot of people would say, “I don’t know, my first draft is always garbage.” Don’t worry about it! You aren’t finalizing the story within November, you’re just using NaNo as inspiration to write.
After I wrote my book, An Unexpected Journey, it took me another 6 months or so of editing after school. I would take a printed paper copy to school with me or when we would be in the car for an extended amount of time. I would go over it, marking it with red pen, and I would have Mom do the same thing during her lunch break. As soon as I finished with homework, I would go home, fire up the computer and start typing in my edits. When Mom handed me hers, I would go over it with her and discuss the changes we were considering.
That’s also not to say that I was always editing. I would hit a big project in school and not work on it for days at a time. But it eventually came about. The edits thinned, and we started sending it to CreateSpace, a self-publishing company that we found through NaNo. They had their own edits that they suggested, all grammatical and the such.
If my memory holds true, it was June 2015. It was just under 2 months to my 10th birthday when I received the news that the CreateSpace system had finished suggesting edits and had provided Amazon with the book and my foreword about it, which would go as the description on the page. And that was it. I was officially a published author.
I can’t thank NaNo enough for my success. If Mom hadn’t found NaNo, I might never have reached this point. Of course I would write, though how long it would take me to finish a story I don’t know, but it would have taken me years to build up the courage to publish. By using NaNo, I forced myself to get online and keep writing the story. There was no, “Meh. I don’t feel like writing today.” I had a deadline, and I wanted to win.
