On NaNoWriMo

Holy crap, guys. NaNo is crazy. And all you guys who do it are crazypants.

(During NaNo, we all look like this, whether we're "winning" or not. Haha. Charlie Sheen jokes.)

But, whether you won or not, congrats. Writing is freaking hard. If you wrote 500, 5000, or 50000 words in November, those are all words you didn't have before. Which is why anyone who does NaNo (or not, anyone who just writes) wins.

Congrats to all, and I tip my hat you.


Anyone who writes a novel is da bomb. (Now, go edit and edit. Don't freaking start querying today. Or all the agents will kill you.)

The Writer Crazy...Combatting It

This shall be a short blog post. Mostly 'cause I'm doing NaNoWriMo, and I'm worded out. Like all the time. Thus, brevity is the word of the day.

So, combatting the "Writer Crazy" as I call it. What is this thing I speak of? In my experience, as writers, we are pretty much constantly in a state of:



'Cause we're artists. It's how we roll. I mean, with the craziness of querying, publishing, and actually writing the darn novel, we have a lot to be crazy about. And writing is so scary, because we are completely putting ourselves out there, naked, and being like, "Judge me, world!"

Unfortunately, this comes with some severe writing-related mood swings, aka The Writer Crazy. For me at least, some days (had one of these a couple days ago), I think, 'Dang. This is so good, Ernest Hemingway would fangirl out over it.' (If ONLY there was an Ernest Hemingway Fangirl gif...) But then other days (yesterday) I end up just staring at the computer screen thinking, 'No. There would be no fangirling. My writing would drive Ernest to drinking.'

The magic cure-all to this? STOP IT. Just keep writing. Write a new, better chapter if you're in a spiral of self-doubt. And if you're on a roll, SWEET. Keep it up writer of awesomeness. The thing is, I'm pretty sure we all go through the crazy. I bet JK Rowling even, at one point, wanted to close Harry Potter and Mischief Managed the crap out of it. Good thing she didn't.

So, in short, if you're having an "I suck" kinda day, go back and read something you wrote that you LOVE. And have a sangria, or a hot chocolate. And then, tomorrow, get back on it. Cause I wanna see your book on the Barnes and Noble shelves one day, friend.