Let’s get really practical today about our lives during NaNoWriMo! I’m talking to all you parents out there.
 
Keeping my kids busy this November will be my biggest NaNo challenge (aside from writing 50,000 words!) I’ve come up with a list of activities (way more than 30 if you count each entry) to tack up near [...]

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I love to throw parties, small ones with just a few friends to big ones with a 100 plus people. I might spontaneously invite a few people over, but I would never call 100 people to see if they’re free on Friday. Both events take a level of planning and preparedness, but the levels required [...]

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The biggest problem I face when participating in a writing challenge is overcoming the belief that I can do it.
Yes, you heard me right. I’ve jumped into writing challenges half a dozen times in the last couple years thinking, “This won’t be too bad. I can do this.” And that’s about the extent of my [...]

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It’s your first sale or maybe your tenth sale … it doesn’t matter. What matters is that you have a part-time job outside of writing, a husband, one child who plays baseball, one in ballet and friends who’d like to see you once in awhile. They all need attention and it’s up to you to [...]

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If you plan to participate in November’s maniacal writing event, NaNoWriMo, you need to prepare those around you as much as you need to prepare yourself. You don’t want to alienate someone you love by your singleminded devotion to stringing together long trains of words. /p>
So how to prepare? Each year for me is a [...]

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What a great week we’ve had here at Routines for Writers. Our Guest Blogger Karen Wiesner has pumped up the excitement level for NaNoWriMo. We’ve had hundreds of readers visiting this week. I hope you all have great plans for your writing in November.
 
So, last year’s NaNo…I went into it with a title and two [...]

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Introductory Note: Karen Wiesner started a series of blogs this week to help us make it successfully through NaNoWriMo (and beyond, really). The first blog was on Tuesday, called Planning for NaNoWriMo: Building an Outline. It really is a companion piece to this one so make sure you check it out here. We’ve put these two blogs [...]

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Preparing the writing itself for NaNoWriMo is probably the most important thing I can do in October. Planning my life to accommodate the increased writing hours and the decreased “everything else” hours is important, and we’ll talk about that next week, but the writing… ahhh. 
The best part about this kind of planning is that [...]

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Introductory note: How are you going to spend your NaNoWriMO? Write by the seat of your pants or plan a detailed outline? Stephanie is our resident write-by-the-seat-of-her-pants gal and she writes really well that way. I (Shonna) tried that last year and decided that this year I needed a little more planning. So I sought [...]

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Every person writes differently. Some people plot extensively before they write a word. Some don’t. Some people spend inordinate amounts of time getting to know their characters. Some not so much. Some people fill out questionnaires, calendars, timelines and all kinds of charts as part of their planning process. Some just start typing. Each of [...]

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