Official NaNoWriMo Pep Talk + Updates

My assistant Peter has uploaded a new Twitter posts collection and another MYTHWALKER chapter. This is a novel that I abandoned back in 2001, but I cannibalized the parts that were working into WARBREAKER when I started writing that. This chapter contains the first scene that another scene in WARBREAKER parallels, though I rewrote it entirely from scratch.

In this week's Writing Excuses podcast episode we discuss mystery plotting. We also recently put out very short pep talks for people participating in National Novel Writing Month: from Dan, Mary, and me.

I also did an official pep talk for the NaNoWriMo folks that you can read here. Here's an excerpt:

In the year 2002, Thanksgiving in the U.S. fell relatively late in the month of November. So it was that on November 30th, I found myself at my mother’s house, home from college for the weekend. I lay on the log bed in the guest room, my stomach full of turkey leftovers, furiously pounding at the last novel I would finish before landing a book deal the following year.

I’d done NaNoWriMo the previous year, and had found the experience to be wonderful. This year, my friends and I were holding a competition to see which of us could finish first, and it came down to the last day. I won. And I didn’t.

You see, while I’ve had a lot of fun with NaNoWriMo over the years, I think it’s time to come clean. Though I’ve participated seven times so far, and I’ve never actually won. Oh, I’ve completed the fifty thousand words. I commonly write 50k words in a given month these days, as writing is my profession. However, what I’ve never done is start a brand new project on the first of November, then keep writing straight through on it.

Read the rest on the NaNo site.