About NaNoWriMo & Our Site

What’s NaNoWrimo??

National Novel Writing Month is a yearly event that takes place for the entire month of November. The goal — write a 50,000 word novel by the end of the month.

The Official(tm) Statement (from http://www.nanowrimo.org/eng/whatisnano)

Valuing enthusiasm and perseverance over painstaking craft, NaNoWriMo is a novel-writing program for everyone who has thought fleetingly about writing a novel but has been scared away by the time and effort involved.

Because of the limited writing window, the ONLY thing that matters in NaNoWriMo is output. It’s all about quantity, not quality. The kamikaze approach forces you to lower your expectations, take risks, and write on the fly.

Make no mistake: You will be writing a lot of crap. And that’s a good thing. By forcing yourself to write so intensely, you are giving yourself permission to make mistakes. To forgo the endless tweaking and editing and just create. To build without tearing down.

As you spend November writing, you can draw comfort from the fact that, all around the world, other National Novel Writing Month participants are going through the same joys and sorrows of producing the Great Frantic Novel. Wrimos meet throughout the month to offer encouragement, commiseration, and—when the thing is done—the kind of raucous celebrations that tend to frighten animals and small children.

So there you have it. It’s a hell of a lot of fun and you have the chance to connect with tonnes of fellow writers along the way during your quest for your very own insta-novel. Have fun!

Nanowrimo in the Tricities

While plenty of authors in the area here have been taking part in Nanowrimo for years now, this is the first year the Tricities have their own regional forum over at Nanowrimo HQ. We built this site to complement that forum and add some extra depth for our region.

As of it’s launch (Oct 3/08) we have our Event Calendar, news and a place to put future photos. I imagine we’ll be adding more to the site in the coming weeks, so check back regularly!

Thanks for stopping by!

Cheers,
Ben (Generik99 — Webmaster)

Our Municipal Liaisons

Jo (Merpy) [Author Profile]

I’m the brand new ML for the brand new Kitchener-Waterloo region, hooray! My favourite things include cats, good books, social psychology, the smell of dish soap, baking, soccer, copying descriptions of myself from my Nano profile, and hats with ears… spot me at write-ins wearing my bright orange fox toque! If you look around (go on, look around now) and don’t see fox ears anywhere, you may need to contact me by email instead.

I’m a fairly regular nanomail checker, or you can use my gmail account, as long as you promise you’re not a spambot. It’s jo (dot) merlin (squiggly at symbol) gmail (dot) com.