I said, I said ARG.

This novel thing is frustrating me.

I think NaNoWriMo is made for other types of writers, you know, the kind who have confidence to leave their firsty first drafts alone. My idea of a first draft is usually something I wrote a week ago and have had time to revise since. I have a hard time just opening the document and picking up where I started.

Damn you people for whom this is fun!

My old agent boss Lori Perkins has a really good post about NaNoWriMo. I always liked Lori. She is one of the most outspoken, fun and life-loving people I've met. She's also completely insane and works about 16 hours most days, wheeling and dealing for 8 of them and reading slush for 8 more. I like what she says here quite a bit and I recommend you read it.

I sense a little bit of backlash against NaNoWriMo, and sometimes I can't blame the people who do so. I mean, I've heard NaNoers talk about blatant tricks to raise wordcount, like having one character say, "I didn't catch that," so another character has to repeat it. (Okay, I actually have somewhat of a trick to raise wordcount. There's a goblin annotating the manuscript and writing footnotes. It's meta.)

But when you add it up, why is a burst of creativity from a ton of people a bad thing? If you want to be a writer, nothing will stop you. Go ahead and vomit 50,000 words onto the page and fix it later. As a teenager, I typically vomited 150-250k words per giant Robert Jordan imitation novel. I think I've done all right for myself since. The sales are slow, but they come. Also, I write the occasional 4k short story now. (It's a gradual recovery from Big Book Syndrome. This little 75k-er I'm working on now is part of the process.)

I do have a major problem when people say, "I have no time to read because I'm writing so much." Sounds like "I have no time to drink water because I'm hiking so much."