A couple hubs ago, I admitted that one of my lifetime goals was to write a book, whether it got published or not (though it would be fun if it did get published!). The next day – at least I think it was the next day – pgrundy, from here at hubpages.com, placed a thread in the forums about signing up to write a novel in nanowrimo.com.

Pgrundy invited any other hubbers who would like to join her and a few other hubbers to write their books together and interact in the Nanowrimo forums together. It is an excellent invitation, and if you have been putting off writing a novel for a while, you should sign up and see what you can accomplish.

What is Nanowrimo?

Nanowrimo is a site where you can sign up to write a 50,000 page novel in the course of the month of November. 50,000 words is roughly 175 pages – though it depends on your font size, and also divides out to 1667 words a day (which is, depending on your average hubsize – about 2-3 hubs a day).

It is free to join and anyone over the age of 13 can join. In 2008, Nanowrimo had 120,000 people sign up and participate, and 20,000 of them were able to surpass their goal of 50,000 words!

It gives you the benefit of writing without worrying over details – as that would take too much time. You will be able to complete something and then go back over it and tweak it in the following months.

If you are able to complete 50,000 words by the end of the month, you will be added to Nanowriter’s list of winners, and of course have bragging rights to all the other hubbers participating. You will also have a rough draft of your first novel – and yes, it will be rough.

Signing Up

It only takes a few steps to sign up for Nanowrimo. Chose a user name and enter your email address so they can verify you are real. You should also read through the terms and conditions. You should note that you will have to know basic math as there is a math question at the end (usually something like 3+4=?). If this is too difficult for you, maybe you are not old enough to be on the site? If you are old enough and are just bad at math, use a calculator and enter the right answer.

Page Benefits

You can insert author info, novel info and get writing buddies (if you sign up, let me know – I wanna be your buddy!). There is also a table that will show your personal stats and the stats of your region.  The nice thing about doing it with other hubbers, is that we will all be able to encourage each other in our writing and hopefully we will all be able to succeed it our novel-writing.

There isn’t a way to view other novels, but if you want to post your rough-draft novel on hubpages after (in several different hubs of course) we could all pitch in and help you edit and tweak it.

So I hope you will join, and I will see you next month, when the writing games begin!