Last week we talked about The Guardians, the new novel by T.M. Franklin. 
Today T.M. Franklin will tell us more about
A Novel in 30 Days. Seriously?
No? What is NaNoWriMo, you ask?
It stands for National Novel Writing Month, and it’s an annual writing project that brings together writers from all over the world. They gather in chat rooms, forums, and libraries, Twitter, Skype, and Facebook, encouraging each other in their endeavor to write a novel (or at least a good chunk of one) during the month of November. Fifty-thousand words in thirty days. That’s 1,667 words a day if you’re breaking it down. The NaNoWriMo website hooks you up with local writing sessions and even provides a word-count graph so you can keep track of whether or not you’re on track to finish the challenge.
A lot of people find the idea daunting—to write every single day, with a goal of just under seventeen-hundred words a day. It really helped me, though. To be accountable (even if it’s just to myself and my NaNo friends) to sit down and write every day helps keep me motivated and focused. It also taught me to write without editing, which is harder than it sounds. There’s always the temptation to go back and fix things as you’re writing along, but the idea of NaNoWriMo is to just keep writing.
You get the idea.
My first NaNoWriMo was in 2011, and I met the challenge that year, writing about two-thirds of my debut novel MORE during the month. I still had to finish it up in the following weeks and months, but it was published in October of 2012. I didn’t do so well in NaNo 2012, mainly because I was promoting MORE at the time, but I still managed to write a good chunk of The Guardians during November.
And no, they don’t send you degrading e-mails or flog you on Facebook if you don’t meet the goal. You just have to go back in December and keep on writing.
MORE and The Guardians: Book 2 in the MORE Trilogy are now available!
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Thank you, T.M. Franklin!
T.M. Franklin started out her career writing non-fiction in a television newsroom. Graduating with a B.A. in Communications specializing in broadcast journalism and production, she worked for nine years as a major market television news producer, and garnered two regional Emmy Awards, before she resigned to be a full-time mom and part-time freelance writer. After writing and unsuccessfully querying a novel that she now admits, “is not that great,” she decided to follow the advice of one of the agents who turned her down—write some more and get better at it. Her first published novel, MORE, was born during National Novel Writing month, a challenge to write a novel in thirty days.
She lives in the Pacific Northwest with her husband, Mike, is mom to two boys, Justin and Ryan, and has an enormous black dog named Rocky who’s always lying nearby while she’s writing. Whether he’s soothed by the clicking of the computer keys or just waiting for someone to rub his belly is up for debate.
In addition to MORE and The Guardians, Franklin penned the Amazon best-selling short story, Window, as well as another short story, A Piece of Cake, which appears in the Romantic Interludes anthology.
