National Novel Writing Month isn’t easy, but it’s worth it. Here are a few things I both learned and re-learned during this year’s challenge.
More Than Strong (How Romance Highlights the Every Woman)
When I write strong female characters, I think of it more with the emphasis on strong character, creating heroines and female main characters that are strongly written, fleshed out and three dimensional. The character isn’t strong, necessarily, because of her physical abilities or emotional capacity. She is strong because the characterization is strong and complete.
Why I Still Do NaNo
NaNo is an excellent tool that has provided me with an education in storytelling, a community, and support that us loner-writer types really do need. And though those benefits may change over time, they don’t go away. After more than a decade of this madcap writing sprint, here are a few reasons I keep going back.
A Writer? Anything But.
There was never a time in my life I wasn’t making up mad tales and then eventually putting them to paper, where my love for the idea turned into a love for the words themselves and then the craft and then combination of all three. What would I be if I wasn’t a writer? I have no idea.
House on the Hill
This house, specifically, called to my baser self for over a year. What does that have to do with writing? Everything.
Dukes, Seals, Scots, Oh My!
Over the course of my evolving love for the romance genre, and my need to read more to write more, I have discovered many genres that I would never have known I loved, had it not been by chance or happy accident. Here are just a few:
Art and Soul
I have learned languages, found lovers and love, failed and succeeded more times than I can count. And through all of that, through the ups and downs, the adventures, experiences, fears and joys, I have always, always been a writer.
