Welcome back to rsts11. As many of my readers know, I was deep in National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) from 2002-2009, from the 7-seconds-left finish in 2002, to running the SFNanos for a couple of years and helping my friend Linda start the Pensinsula group, to coordinating over half a dozen writers retreats, as well as finishing eight 50,000 word drafts for those years.

Last year, I did an unofficial November Novel with the Reedsy project, and I’m doing it again this year. And this time, I’m using it as a prompt (heh) to do videos.

The first two are posted, and yeah, the production values are a bit light. I’ve been out of video production for almost two years, and with plans to do 1-3 videos a week this month, I’m hoping to get my studio space working and my productions polished.

The first video was scripted, although I went off in a lot of places. That’s okay. I’m okay with how it turned out (and the original script is below, for your enjoyment).

If you’re doing a November Novel with any of the entities doing events in NaNoWriMo’s wake, subscribe to the Andromedary Instinct YouTube channel and my Novel November playlist.

Haven’t started yet? It’s not too late, as I mention in the first video. You can either accelerate your daily rate (if you start on November 5, you have 25 days of 2,000 words), or just start your thirty days then. My record for daily word count was a little over 19,000 words on November 30, 2003, and I don’t recommend it, but with Veteran’s Day and the 4-day Thanksgiving holiday (for those whose employers observe), you can catch up better than almost any other month of the year.

I’ll also be doing some tech and health videos before the end of the month, including my 2025 adventure to back away from Type 2 Diabetes and get an efficient home lab running.

Stay tuned for more videos, and text accompaniment to the videos, here on rsts11.com. And there might be some travel stuff soon on rsts11travel.com too.

DO YOU WANT TO WRITE A NOVEL?

I never thought I would start from Disney Princess karaoke and get to Hello Kitty when planning a video, but here we are.

Do you want to write a novel?

Are you one of the millions of people out there who say you want to write a novel? Or even a short story?

Are you looking at the length of a novel and getting winded just thinking about writing 40 to 120 thousand words?

Just need a push in the right direction?

Then write a novel with me this November.

If you’re finding this video after November, or too far into the month, then just start and follow along on time delay. It’s never too late.

As Hello Kitty said, magic is believing in yourself. If you can do that, you can make anything happen.

And as I’m about to say, I believe in you. You can make a novel happen.

WHY WRITE A NOVEL IN NOVEMBER?

Just before the turn of the century, a guy named Chris Baty got together with a few of his friends in Berkeley (or maybe it was Oakland) and started a first draft of a novel during the month of November.

Within a couple of years, tens of thousands of people worldwide participated in National Novel Writing Month, or Nanowrimo. It spawned communities, online and offline; more than a few officially published authors and published Nanowrimo projects, and hundreds of thousands of people who could now say “Hey, I’m a novelist.” And the TGIO, or thank god it’s over, parties in San Francisco were always a wonder to look forward to.

There’s nothing innately magical about November. I mean, it’s mostly before the typical family holidays in the US, and many people have a four day weekend to catch up on backlog near the end of the month, but you could do it any month. Some people do it every month.

But November was when the event was invented. So other than the name, that’s why Novel November is in November.

I was one of those November novelists, from 2002 to 2009.

And every year, I put at least fifty thousand words into a document during November, along with dozens of my local writer friends.

I was a South Bay Nanowrimo writer, or Sobanano, even when I lived in San Francisco. I ran the San Francisco Nanowrimo group for a couple of years, and helped a friend launch the Peninsula group. I coordinated at least half a dozen writing retreats for Bay Area writers. But the main thing was that fifty thousand word effort every year.

Life got complicated during and after the 2009 Nanowrimo, and I took a break. A long one.

Around Christmas 2023, I started writing again. I wasn’t targeting a novel in a month. But January 2024 was a seventy seven thousand word month. So I knew I could do it again. November 2024 was almost sixty two thousand words, with over fifty two thousand on my November Novel project.

This year, Nanowrimo closed down as an organization, due to some controversies you can use a search engine or AI chatbot to learn about, but you can bet that hundreds of thousands of writers are still going to write.

You could be one of them.

And you know what?

If you write one sentence, you’re in the top ten percent of “I want to write a novel” writers.

If you finish a full page, you’re probably in the top five percent if not higher.

And if you get an average of sixteen hundred sixty seven words a day in November?

Easily top one percent.

And you can call yourself a novelist.

BUT I’M NOT READY TO PUBLISH A NOVEL

You don’t have to be. This isn’t saying you’re a published novelist.

It doesn’t even mean you have to write a good novel.

You don’t even have to finish the story.

It’s a first draft.

It’s a habit.

It’s letting yourself be imperfect in the pursuit of a goal you’ve dreamed of at least since the beginning of this video. Probably longer.

Sit down on the first day. Think up and write down a scene, or a character, or an event. Lather, rinse, and repeat.

There are lots of books of writing prompts, websites that will help you with sprint scheduling and writing prompts, and maybe you can just sit outside a coffee shop and write what you see.

The goal is to get the words out of your head, onto physical or virtual paper.

If fifty thousand words is too much, set a lower goal. You could commit to writing 15 minutes every morning. Write one page in your word processor or notebook every day. Even if you don’t hit the “official” threshold, you’ll get further than ever before, and further than most people ever will.

DO I HAVE TO BUY SPECIAL SOFTWARE TO WRITE A NOVEL?

Absolutely not. You can even write longhand on paper. It’s harder to count the words that way, but some of the best novels ever written were done with pen and paper, or a manual typewriter. I’d suggest an electric typewriter, if you go that way.

You can use the notes app on your phone or tablet. Google Docs, Microsoft Word, the Apple word processor, Notepad, Textedit, whatever you like.

There are free programs like Reedsy Studio and Autocrit that will let you write into a web-based platform from your computer or tablet or even phone.

Many if not all of these options will even let you dictate with your voice. But you don’t have to.

There are pretty easy ways to scan your handwritten or typed copy into a word processor or editing software. I’ll talk about that in a later video.

ARE THERE ANY SITES THAT MIGHT HELP ME ALONG THE WAY?

Well, I’ll try to inspire you a bit over the weekends this month, maybe more often if I can get to it.

You should also do a quick websearch to see if there are local writing groups you could join. If you’re an introvert, it may not be that bad. We used to have dozens of people take over a restaurant or coffee shop and sit silently for an hour or two writing.

My Nanowrimo friend Marklin Foster, a published author in his own right (or write), has a blog post about a couple of options. I’ll mention them here.

Pro Writing Aid has “Novel November” which guides you through the month, and it’s free.

Autocrit has a Novel 90 event that you can still get into, even though November first is the thirty second day of those 90 days.

And my personal favorite, Reedsy, has a Novel Sprint in November.

I’m pretty sure they all still have free tiers for their software offerings, and I wrote with Reedsy for free for a long time before they introduced their paid premium add-ons. You don’t need those for your first novel anyway.

I’ll leave links to Marklin’s post and the challenges he dug into. You don’t need to use these, of course. If you do use a cloud platform like Reedsy, I’ll cover backing up your work in a future video. Trust me, the last thing you want to be doing is buying shady software from a random website in Russia when the only copy of your novel gets damaged because you checked your laptop bag at the airport for a flight out of Key West. You can guess how I know that. But thanks, HDD Regenerator.

SO WHERE DO WE GO FROM HERE?

If you’re going to write a novel with me, whether you’re getting into it on Halloween 2025 or sometime in 2050, drop a note in the comments. I think I’m required by Youtube Creator Standards to ask you to like and subscribe and enable notifications, so, hey, do that, please. And check back for my future videos on Novel November so we can update each other on our progress.

I was dreaming of posting a daily update, but it took me a week to get this video out of my head and into the iPhone. So I’m going to try to visit with you every weekend (or Monday morning) with a helpful tip or two and my own status update.

Check back this weekend for my first Novel November update and my first tips.

Good luck with your writing! You can do it.