It’s not no shave November is Movember. Moustaches for Novemeber. Optional sideburns but they can’t touch the moustache. Just like the cool old timers. It’s been very clear when this started what the rules were.
And it isn’t about doing it as a challenging it’s about raising awareness and money for testicular cancer.
National Novel Writing Month, often abbreviated NaNoWriMo, is an annual event encouraging people to finally write that novel they’ve always said they would. The goal is to write 50K words during the month. There are usually meet ups, writing workshops, and other gatherings so participants can encourage each other, share ideas, and generally have fun being part of a thing.
Edit to add: The “nation” is the USA I’m assuming. I’m in the USA and have only heard of it being a US thing. Presumably if you live somewhere else and want to write a book in November, the various online communities would be glad to have you though.
Some ridiculous percentage of all currently publishing novelists in the US have an MFA in literature or creative writing or something similar. If this makes you feel a little suspicious about how the publishing industry actually works, it should. It’s very much a closed ecosystem that’s all about recycling the tried and true and that is highly risk averse in terms of straying from the norm. This is why it’s almost impossible for “regular” people to get a novel published unless they self-publish.
He also does a friendly competition thing with his fans in his subreddit every year in November. He posts how many words he writes in a week and encourages others to post their word-count to see if anyone can keep up with his output.
Just finished his 4 secret project books. Also just finished the first Mistborn trilogy with my son and started in on the Wax and Wayne series with him (I’ve already read them). I freaking love me some Brandon Sanderson.
Nice. Yeah his prose is meh, but the world building, character writing, and volume are amazing. I’m in the middle of stormlight right now and loving it.
Stormlight is my absolute favorite series. Yeah, Sanderson doesn’t write as flowery as some authors, but that’s not what I’m looking for. I love how he puts together a whole world with a new magic system, history, religions, political climate, etc. Then is like, alright so that’s what the world was like hundreds of years ago, now let’s see what happens when they get guns and spaceships!
I’ve done it. You’re not supposed to come up with a finished product in 30 days (although some people do). Mine was a first draft of roughly 55k words.
I’m reading a short book by Patrick Rothfuss (The Narrow Road Between Desires). This dude is such a notoriously slow writer that it drives me crazy. He had the audacity to do an author’s introduction where he said this was an existing story of his, but he added 15k words to it. I’m like… what is that, a couple weeks? Write faster, you bastard!
And it’s not like this kind of attitude online has in any way made him self-conscious and led to us most likely never getting the conclusion to his series.
I love the idea of Rothfuss planning all day, coming up with the perfect next chapter in his life’s work, knowing just how to wrap up the intricate threads he’s woven. Then he boots up his laptop, slowly stretches and cracks his fingers. Just before he opens up his word processor to record his beautifully crafted prose, he decides to check out Lemmy for a few minutes. Then he comes across a random comment of mine saying how his fans are frustrated at his pace of writing, and just goes:
“I absolutely care about finishing the book… I feel bad about [not giving people what they want] all the time. It’s one of the things that’s fucking me up, I’m in a lot of therapy right now… I went from fiddling around with a book that I just liked to work on and I knew would never be published… then it’s like 'hey a million people are disappointed in you because they want this book. It’s not a great feeling. … If I didn’t care about the book, you’d have it by now… I owe everyone who loved the book something beautiful”
Exactly dude. He’s sold 10,000,000+ books and the pressure is clearly too much for him. And while we can’t unsell those books for him, the best we can do is spread the word far and wide that Patrick Rothfuss writes like old people fuck. If we each do our best to discourage new fans from jumping on the hype train, we just might have a shot at getting the 3rd Kingkiller Chronicles book before we die.
NaNoWriMo? It’s a push to get that writing project out of your brain and onto paper, it’s super helpful for some people just to have something telling them to do the thing.
NNN? Test of self control. “I can quit any time I want” is something addicts say when they can’t quit any time they want. It’s also super easy; if it feels like masochism to not nut for more than a week, you’re addicted.
My daughter starts a new online school program and I have to be a “learning coach” which basically means I have to keep an eye on her during the school day and help her when she needs it.
I think it will be very difficult, but rewarding. Going down to a single income sucks, but she had to be taken out of school because of some serious bullying. I just hope this will make her happier.
This thread went longer and more serious than I could’ve imagined at the outset. Glad I stuck with it! Congrats on the mod role (maybe I’m late to notice?).
Sorry to hear about your daughter and income situation. Kids, and the parents that raise them that way, can be such di**s.
Thanks for all of that. The mod thing was a surprise to me. One day, I was a mod. No one asked me. And that thread is getting dangerously close to the maximum number of posts Discourse allows.
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