EPTWhile it wasn't a huge deal on this site, National Novel Writing Month (or NaNoWriMo) is amazing. Before November I was in a bad habit of spouting pitches for novels and short stories but never actually spending the effort to get a metaphorical puke-bucket for my spoutings. My latest idea was a story about the world ending in every way everyone ever thought it might-all at the same time. Which yes, I stole from Neil Gaiman. A friend of mine heard my idea and suggested I enter NaNoWriMo along with her. In NaNoWriMo you write-or pledge to write-50,000 words in the month of November. That's ~1,667 words per day.
At the time I was working as a research assistant to a drug-dealer professor that was creating a grant proposal to figure out how to get people to actually take her drugs. That left a LOT of time for me to be twiddling my thumbs that I devoted to twiddling them on a keyboard instead. I decided on using an interview format (with Charlie Rose) after watching a rerun of his interview with Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Luckily, this perfectly fit with the 1,667 words per day-one interview ended up averaging 1,700-2,000 words. Throughout the month I brought to life and interviewed ballerinas, zombie Ronald Reagan, Dick Cheney, the Lorax, and almost everyone I could think of.
I completed the whole thing, though 2,000 words disappeared at one point mysteriously (I contend they were stolen by the same gnomes that steal pencils). The result was a work of fiction that had come entirely from me and that, for the most part, was pretty damn fun to both read and write. You walk away feeling like you just had a kid except for all the parts involving excruciating pain for your wife and copious amounts of blood and having to stay up late when your baby bawls its head off. You do still get weird food cravings though.
Tl;dr: NaNoWriMo is pretty much like having a baby without all the icky stuff. You even end up getting to post '"Like my baby on facebook!" and "Buy my baby! Please" everywhere.
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Six months on, I'd examined the publishing avenues for new authors and been thoroughly discouraged (mine was either too long, too short, or too satirical to make it) so I used a self-publishing avenue and now, voila! My book is available on Amazon, which is another amazing feeling (and probably another blog entry).
