Tara Maya's Tales

A Boyd's rainforest dragon ( Hypsilurus boydii ) These are my personal tips for NaNoWriMo. You know the drill. Take only what works. Remember when your teacher told you to write a report on gladiolas that had to be ten pages long, so you changed the margins to 2 inches and the font to fourteen point Gils Sans Ultra Bold and BINGO you had a ten page paper? Yeah, you really fooled her! She never saw that trick before, you sly fox. But guess what, you can’t fool yourself. You know that page count doesn’t mean squat, so stop calculating how much you’re writing every day by page count. Page count is easily manipulated; it changes based on a million factors. There’s an entire profession devoted to manipulating page count, called a typesetter. What doesn’t change is word count. Different genres have different ideal word counts. A children’s chapter book is about 6,000 words. A Young Adult novel or a category romance is about 75,000 words. An adult thrill...

Here's the schedule for NaNoWriMo, which you can also find on their site (I assume) and in the emails: November 1 : Write your first 1,667 and feel great about embarking on this wild, wordy adventure. Tell your inner editor to take a hike for the next 30 days, or else. Watch him/her/it skedaddle, and heave a sigh of relief. November 2 : Check your  NaNoMail  early and often for pep talks from staff and published authors, messages from your fellow Wrimos, and updates from your regional Municipal Liaison (AKA magical ninja heroes of noveling goodness). To stay extra-informed about everything happening in NaNoLand, you can also like our  Facebook page , follow us on  Twitter , and keep up with our  daily blog posts . November 3 : Take some time this weekend to stockpile writerly rewards. When you reach a word-count goal, you'll have a treat at the ready to reinforce your admirable dedication to this project. November 5 : You hit your weekend target of 6,668 wor...