Brief Author Bio:

I'm Anne.
My friend Marius got me interested in this pestering me endlessly because for some reason he seemed to think I'd enjoy it. Eventually I agreed to do it and signed up about a month ahead. FYI: Marius did not participate that year leaving his wordcount at 0 the entire month just to infuriate me. I know it was deliberate too and that he's sitting over there chuckling helplessly as I desperatly try to what seems like the impossible.

NaNoWriMo 2008 was my first year. I spent most of October trying to decide on a topic, characters, and storyline. Frequently, I called Marius to see what he thought about an idea and usually I got the response of "It's your story." much to my chagrin. I'd had a (i guess you could call it) general idea running through my head most of my life. With Itallian/New York heritage, i had always wondered if there was a possibility that my family had real Mafia connections. That became the basis of my first story.

November was insane. I took every friday off of work so that I could stay above the word quota. I know I was so lucky to have a job that allowed me to do that. But on the 29th, while in a friendly competition with a fellow Eastside Wrimer, i crossed the 50k line and kept going determined to finish the story by the end of the month.

For those that are looking to try this, I'd like to pass on two bits of encouragement that i found to be very helpful to keep me going throughout my hectic journey through NaNo.

1) The novel Frankenstein was written by a woman who was 18 at the time that she started the manuscript. She finished it by age 19. Granted she wasn't published right away, but you know what? It started out as a contest proposed by Lord Byron for a rainy vacation in Geneva to write their own ghost stories. That's the origin of Frankenstein, one of the greatest breakthrough novels ever written. A friendly competition.

2) Someone rather brilliant (coughMariuscough) told me the following: "So long as you're consistant in whatever world you create, the readers will go along with it. If you want to have a purple polkadotted hydra as the head of the mafia, you can!" To which i replied "which head is the head of the mafia?" and thus recieved an unamused glare. But the essence of this conversation kept me going. If i wanted there to be solely electric cars thirty years from now, I could. If i wanted the government to be set up how i needed it to be for my story to work, i could!

Should you expect to have it completely finished and ready to send to editors and publishing houses come December 1? Heck, should you expect to even have a complete story line by Dec 1. Please excuse me while I fall over from lack of oxygen because I'm laughing too hard.

Expect something that you look at and go "I could never ever in a million years get this idea published." Then take some time off, set a date to come back to it and take a set amount of time to edit it. If the time limit worked to write it, maybe it will work to edit it.
And always remember once you send it out: What's the worst they can do? Say no to publishing it? Laugh? Send it back looking like a body was murdered on top of it?
There are worse things. Truely, there are worse things. It may not seem like it, but in the end what can you do?
You can call yourself a Novelist and get warm and fuzzies for producing a novel. Not everyone can say that.

So I boldly encourage you to defy the odds, conqure the hesitations, discover a world only your imagination can see until you write it down and triumph for your own personal warm and fuzzies.

NaNoWriMo was by far the best motivator I have every come accross for discovering the answer i've always had: Can I actually finish a novel?

Good Luck, my fellow Insanely Determined Writers
Anne