That's right! I began the journey into NaNoWriMo and I've succeeded! For those of you who don't know what NaNoWriMo is, I'll give a brief explanation, but you can probably find a better one at http://www.nanowrimo.org. NaNoWriMo stands for Nation Novel Writing Month and it takes place every November and 2008 was NaNoWriMo's 10 year anniversery. Yay!

Anyway, the goal for the WriMos, as the participants are called, is to write a 50,000 novel in 30 days. That's about the size of The Great Gatsby or double the length of Animal Farm. That means writing about 1667 words a day to keep on par. Another key to this whole fiasco is just letting your creativity take you where ever you let it. Although some planning and a few notes are allowed, some people dive into it with little to no idea what they are saying. In the month of November, the inner-editors of all WriMos curl up in a corner and die as quality is sacrificed for quantity. WriMos like to refer to this as "literary abandon." There is always time to edit after the manuscript is completed. November is not about writing something amazing.. its about writing something - anything.

Many people do not make it, especially on their first try. That's not to shine the spotlight on me or anything. I am one of 21,683 winners of NaNoWriMo 2008 out of a total of 119,301 participants. That's an 18.2% win rate - a new record! Overall, though, all participants this year wrote a collective total of 1,643,343,993 (tha'ts in billions) words this year, and I want to congradulate all my fellow WriMos. Even committing to the attempt is quite a feat indeed.

Anyway, back to being selfish and talking about me.

All NaNoWriMo winners can get a free paperback proof of their manuscript, provided by Amazon.com. Now, how can I turn down an offer like that? I even have the option of working with Amazon to release it to the public, but I have to look into that. The offer is quite tempting though. :D

My NaNo is titled Obsidian Earth and I am very proud of its plot. However, since it is a recent NaNoWriMo winner, it has the quality equivalent to a mouthful of sand. My 52,074 novel should probably have ended 20,000 words earlier. It will be going through an intense editting process before being released. It still has the makings of a great novel, though, and I can't wait until it's ready for public eyes. Who knows? Maybe it'll someday be avaliable on Amazon.com! But I don't want to get ahead of myself, though. Gotta keep my feet on the ground.. sorta.

But speaking of being published.....

Amazon.com also has a competition coming up known as the "Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award." You can check out the details over at http://www.amazon.com/ABNA. But it is basically a competition for an author to get a novel published. It's a free competition and the prizes are quite the incentive. They accept a total 10,000 entries and those who make it into the Quarter-Finals (500 quarter-finalists possible) then you receive a review from Publisher's Weekly as well as many Amazon.com users...a good enough incentive for me. I just want to see how far I can get, and if I get far enough, what the general reception of my work is.

Of course, dreaming big can't hurt, so i'm still keeping my eye on the other prizes. 3 first prize winners get a trip to Seattle to the award ceremony where the Grand Prize winner is announced. The Grand Prize winner gets $25,000 cash prize as well as a full publishing contract with Penguin Publishers and promotion for the winning novel on Amazon.com.

However, even first and second prize winners sometimes get publishing contracts with Penguin or other companies. Who says publicity can't be a good thing?

So.... a basic recap of my ramblings are:

[] I am a winner of NaNoWriMo 2008.
[] I will be obtaining a paperback proof of my NaNo Obsidian Earth sometime in summer 2009.