NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month) describes itself as “Thirty days and nights of literary abandon!”

I love that.

This is your chance to set time aside each day for a month to do something like write a book.

I’m going to use this month to work on a book—it’s not a novel so I can’t join NaNoWriMo. Last year when I was working for the Prags I created PragProWriMo. At the end of this post I’ll link to the corresponding post(s) of a year ago as I moved them to this blog after I left the Prags in February.

So even if you don’t have a novel or a book burning inside of you, you must have some project that would benefit from daily attention. You could start to learn a new instrument or a new language. You could follow The Daily Shoot and take photos around the daily theme and choose one to submit each day.

Even if you didn’t start on November first, or like so many people I know, spent the first day trying to get everything just right before you got started—start today.

We won’t wait for you, but you can catch up. Start writing, learning, shooting until you get in the groove.

Step one for me was restarting the blog!

Links from last year

PragProWriMo: Your commitment is to sit down every day and write pages. They don’t have to be good pages—they won’t be great pages—you’ll have plenty of time to fix them later. Keep writing.

What to Write About: There is no end of topics to write about. Remember, your goal this month is to write a book. It doesn’t need to be a best seller or even one that any publisher would sign. If you were unconstrained by the market, what book would you write? (If part of your dream is also to get published, that’s ok too.)

The Journey: We’ll spend a lot of time this month talking about your journey as a writer. Today let’s think a bit about your reader’s journey.

Mechanics: Your task for today is to set up your writing environment so that tomorrow you can get started on your book.

Getting Started: The reader needs to start at the beginning. Your book needs to start at the beginning. You don’t, however, need to start at the beginning when you are writing your book. You can. I’m just saying you don’t have to.