Confessions of a first-time Wrimo

As an intern here at NAPCO (the parent company of Book Business and Publishing Executive), I am constantly exposed to new, exciting things happening in the publishing industry. Two weeks ago, I wrote an article celebrating the kickoff of NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month). In that article, I challenged all you publishers to one month of literary abandon in which you (yes, you!) could become authors yourselves. I wanted to take a minute to check in on your progress, and to share my own NaNoWriMo experience with you. That’s right, you are currently reading the words of another first-time Wrimo.
NaNoWriMo—in which participants pledge to write a 50,000-word novel during the month of November—is probably one of the crazier things I’ve signed up to do. First of all, before this month, I had not done anything to indicate that I had any latent talent that would enable me to be a novelist. As an English major at a liberal arts college, I’m used to writing papers, sure, but those papers usually cap off at around 10-15 pages; 50,000 words come out to around 200 pages. Additionally, the only creative writing class I’ve ever taken is creative non-fiction—not exactly something to qualify me to write a novel.