It’s also Ashe’s story, which turned out to be more stressful to me as a writer because I had to rake my poor muse through the coals in this one. With everything from the beginning to the clunky ending, the poor baby needs a major overhaul so instead of jumping into a whole new story, this month is devoted to Ashe and Riley (well, maybe Collateral‘s Heath and Billie, too, which is in editing phase) so I can get them through that awkward growing phase in any relationship. This year, I’m rewriting the second book of the Loving Ashe Trilogy, Loving Riley, for my NaNoWriMo project. Then off to the editor followed by 8 months of percolating till I hit the publish button in August of this year. That was a major accomplishment for me and I realized that even after churning out 140K words of fan fiction, I could also write just about as many words, even more, of original fiction.įor last year’s NaNoWriMo, I wrote Loving Ashe, and by the time I was done, I had 110K words done in a month and a half. But the bug hit me then, because the following year, when Camp NaNoWriMo came along, I churned out 90K words of a novel whose character of Greg became the basis for Erik Maystrom in Finding Sam a year later. I totally failed the first year, churning out 16K words after ten years of not writing. I’ve always been an advocate for literacy so this ticked all my buttons when I first heard about it three years ago.

Camp NaNoWriMo is a virtual writing retreat, designed to provide the community, resources, and tools needed to complete any writing prompt, novel or not.

The Come Write In program provides free resources to libraries, community centers, and local bookstores to build writing havens in your neighborhood.

The Young Writers Program promotes writing fluency, creative education, and the sheer joy of novel-writing in K-12 classrooms. We provide free classroom kits , writing workbooks, Common Core-aligned curricula, and virtual class management tools to more than 2,000 educators from Dubai to Boston.

Through all our programs, we work to empower and encourage writing and vibrant creativity around the world: National Novel Writing Month is also a 501(c)(3) nonprofit (formerly known as the Office of Letters and Light) that believes your story matters. It also stands for National Novel Writing Month and here’s the official information from their website: Just keep on going till you get to 50K and even higher.

It sounds crazy, but the whole point is to get the story down on paper. For the uninitiated, NaNoWriMo is a monthlong write-fest for people like me to write 50k words in 30 days. Well, it’s November 1st, and that means that NaNoWriMo has officially started.

Loving Ashe by Liz Madrid