National Novel Writing Month – NaNoWriMo

Thank you so much for joining me for the journey to publishing the Blazekeeper of Bowmore House, coming out March 24, 2026, published by Sea Crow Press.

I wrote the first draft of the book that would become The Blazekeeper of Bowmore House in November 2018 as part of a program called NaNoWriMo. The program in that form is no longer around, but back in the day, it was the gold standard of a really unique and amazing writing experience.

Here’s how it worked: writers of all levels all over the world made a commitment to write 50,000 words of a novel during the month of November. Participants started as early as after midnight on Halloween – e.g. in the wee hours of November 1 – and wrote as many words as they could. The word count as of midnight November 30 determined the end result: those who had written 50,000 words could declare that they had “won” Nanowrimo.

There was a web site and you created a profile and registered to participate. (I think it was free, but donations were accepted.) Each day, you logged your progress in number of words and the dashboard would tell you how much you had left and an average of how many words you had to write for the remaining days in order to make it over the finish line.

The program started in 1999, but I can’t tell you when I first heard about it. By the time I tried it in 2018, I knew plenty of people who had done NaNo several times, and some participated annually.

And here’s the bottom line: this thing terrified me. It felt like a marathon. By 2018, I had done enough writing that I knew this was something I could do. And maybe because I knew I could do it, I felt like if I tried it, I had to win. Had to. Like, there was no room for failure. I was going to dive in and give this thing everything I had or I shouldn’t bother.

I can list out my various life responsibilities at the time, the jobs I couldn’t abandon for a month, but the fact is, everybody has these and that’s why NaNoWriMo is a challenge. At the time, my daughter was seven years old, I had a part-time job, a husband, a house, a dog. And November is chock full of interruptions, which other people call holidays. There’s Veteran’s Day and Professional Development days, and OMG Thanksgiving? Which lasts for a whole week! And that year, I was hosting. Plus Christmas was around the corner, and November includes a lot of prep. How was I going to do this? I had no idea.

But I decided to try it anyway. I signed up on the web site. I found my local group, Writers of the North Shore, a group that calls itself WriNoShores – their mascot is the rhino, get it? – and I joined their Facebook page. I was all in.

I learned quickly that this group, these North Shore writers, or rhinos, were a really active group. Throughout the year, a small group of the members gathered in person to write together four times a month. But NaNoWriMo was when the group came alive. There was an amazing schedule of events: a pre-Nano party, several “Write-Ins” through the month, a Saturday potluck dinner and overnight writing event and a post Nano reading night.

This group took this challenge seriously. If NaNoWriMo was a marathon, these folks were prepared to run alongside you, make sure you were fed, hydrated, caffeinated, motivated, excited. Each event included coffee, candy, cookies, carbs. And there was support – this is the kicker. There was a lot of love. I was brand new to the group, and even I felt the love and support. Profoundly.

Guys, I can’t explain how unusual this is for a writer. And for me personally as a human being. To be clear, I enjoy solitude. I crave it. I once read about a literary agent who had wanted to be a writer, but he hated the isolation, so he quit. I’m the opposite. I never needed writing to feel like a team sport. But that’s exactly what NaNo was, it turned the experience of writing into a team sport. All you had to do to join the team was say, hey, I want to join the team.

You didn’t have to have a plan or writing experience or a dog-eared copy of Strunk and White’s Elements of Style. You didn’t have to recite the definition of an Oxford comma. You had to want to write and you had to make the commitment to try to write 50,000 words in November. That's all.

I won’t try to illustrate what an amazing community this group was; I won’t be able to do it justice. There were several organizers, and they functioned as NaNoWriMo angels. They were there to guide and support, encourage, engage and inform. But the mother hen of the rhinos was a woman named Lynne Favreau. Lynne welcomed all these beautiful misfits into her home for the pre-Nano party, the post-Nano party, the overnight and pot luck and other events.

In 2021, Lynne died too soon of cancer. Even though I never participated in another Nano, I really felt that loss. I’d never experienced anything like her commitment and enthusiasm.

November 2018 was incredible. I participated in as many events as I could. I went to the kickoff party at Lynne’s house. Would we all make it to the end? It felt like anything was possible.

We had “write-ins” over Facebook (remember, this was pre-Zoom) in which people logged in and checked in, then did “sprints” which meant no talking, only typing, for a specified amount of time. (Thirty minutes, sometimes more, sometimes less.) I brought my laptop to the homes of people I didn’t know so I could sit among them and write. I got up early in the morning to write, and I wrote at night until I couldn’t keep my eyes open.

I logged my words faithfully every day, and each day, the number went up. I didn’t edit. I didn’t go back. If I suddenly thought of a plot change that altered what came before, I didn’t go back to reconcile the story. It didn’t matter; all that mattered was forward motion and banking words.

I wasn’t convinced that I could do it. And yet, this was war and failure was not an option.

There was no way I was going to lose my first NaNoWriMo. I’m not generally a competitive person, and I am all here for the aphorisms like process is more important than the product, blah blah blah. By this time in my life, I had written three complete novels. I had put my soul and my ego into the garbage disposal shredder that is the search for a literary agent and the search for a publisher. I’d been through a lot with this writing thing. And NaNoWriMo didn’t care if my book was good or clear or readable or I interspersed Oxford commas with serial commas, or even if I changed the characters’ names halfway through the story (although why wouldn’t you just do search and replace to fix that?) All I had to do was write my book.

All right, let’s take a breath. I haven’t even told you about the book I was writing. The title was The Shimmering and it was a two-part novel. The first part, which I think was the bulk of the story, was the story of Cinderella’s mother, Ailen, and how her own mother, Leontyne, had had two infants stolen or murdered by an evil queen, so she’d brought her third child to live in exile. Mother and daughter came to live in a small village in a distant country, and Leontyne did all she could to keep her daughter safe and away from the murderous intentions of an evil queen.

At some point, Leontyne realizes that she’s kept her daughter too isolated, so she invites Rhona, a girl who works as a servant in one of the fine houses of the town, to befriend her daughter. The second half of the story reveals that this girl will become Cinderella’s “wicked” stepmother.

I knew the title The Shimmering wouldn’t work in the long run, but I loved the inspiration. I imagined that before she became friends with Rhona, Ailen hid in her room watching the world from her window. The only person she ever talked to was her mother, and her mother ran a millinery shop, so Ailen was alone and silent for hours each day. I imagined though that her attention was so intense it had a quality that was shimmering. And I loved working with this character who was engaged with the world, but silent, a fairy tale character who lived firmly in the background of one of the world’s favorite fairy tales who the world had never met.

And I loved telling the unknown story of the friendship between Cinderella’s mother and stepmother.

Thus, I went into my NaNoWriMo filled with terror but welcoming all the support. I made a donation to the organization and received an envelope filled with wacky stickers. My daughter was in second grade, and people were constantly giving her stickers, but me? Nobody ever gave me stickers. I was thrilled! Starting on the morning of November 1 (I’m not a night owl these days), I started my journey up the mountain. Indeed, my first stop was the Battlegrounds Café in the town of Haverhill, which was hosting the very first Write-In of the month. Immediately, I met another writer, a cool chick who was writing a series of steamy supernatural romances. Then, another writer joined us, a NaNoWriMo veteran who wrote a series of steamy romantic mysteries.

Writers! I was hanging out with badass writers!

Over the next weeks, I wrote my heart out. My family ate a lot of take-out and the house was messier than usual. I got frustrated by my own inability to stay awake at night but I did what I could. I couldn’t join the pot luck dinner and overnight writing session, but I was excited when people posted photos of darling little writers hunkering down all over Lynne’s house, writing and dozing, then taking a joyous group hike to the river to watch the sun rise.

I found a local café that opened at 5:00 am and on weekends, I went in as early as I could to take advantage of the time before my family awoke. Each day, my word count went up. Still, I was shocked and amazed when, at 9:00 pm on Wednesday, November 14, my file registered 50,155. Better still, I had made it to the end of my draft. I had typed the words, “The End”.

I did it. I won NaNoWriMo! In two weeks. Without abandoning my child or my paid job. I took a screen shot to commemorate the occasion.

November 2018 is an awfully long time ago, but since Covid times count for at least double, it’s an even longer time ago than it seems. (Sometimes math is subjective.) I went back and forth between working on this book and another writing project. In 2022, I worked with an editor who made the brilliant suggestion to somehow tuck the mother’s story into the rest of the Cinderella story. That’s when I turned Ailen’s story into a letter, a document that had profound meaning for her daughter.

Ultimately, I moved Ailen’s story to a subplot – but an important subplot – and most of the actual words I wrote in November 2018 did not make it into the final draft. But that’s okay. It was a hero’s journey to imagining the story, and I could never have gotten to the book I have now if I hadn’t gone through it.

That’s the thing: writing is a hero’s journey. Completing a long-form fictional work takes a lot: imagination, passion, commitment, sandwiches, chocolate, coffee. It takes some of us years, but if you stick with it, suddenly you look behind you, and wow, you wrote a book! It’s like a miracle. Nobody can do the work but you, but if you get a chance to join a community and try writing a draft in a month, you should take it.

I promise you, the people you meet along the way will stay with you forever.