NaNoWriMo - I'll be back in December

Before I sign off for a month, I have few awards I've been hordeing, and I need to say thanks and spread the love. But first, a few words on my November plans - at midnight tonight I will be starting my National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) project, a YA fantasy called A Handful of Scars. This will be my fourth year participating in NaNoWriMo and hopefully my third "win" - if I can produce 50,000 words in 30 days!

I am so excited! This is seriously my favorite time of year. This month is intense, but AMAZING! If you're curious to see what intense pressure brings out in your writing you've got to try NaNoWriMo (in my case, about half of what I write gets trashed, but the other half - WOW!) And then, for a reward when I finish up on Nov. 30 (hopefully), I get to dive into the Christmas season - my second most favorite time of the year.

My strategies for keeping up with the daily word counts, in previous years, is... staying up an extra hour every night and then writing pretty much all day on the weekends (my kids get away with MURDER during November. The junk food I let them eat! And I let them watch WAY too much TV and movies). I've also found writing motivation tools like Write or Die are very helpful - and this year I have a local friend participating as well, so we plan to get together and have "word wars" (who writes the most words in a given period of time, we like to work in thirty minute intervals).

I won't be blogging at all during November, so I encourge you instead of leaving a comment on this post, to skip over to some of the blogs I've listed below and comment on their posts.

I won't admit how long ago, but Stina at Seeing Creative gave me the Beautiful Blogger award. Stina's blog is has a series called Cool Links every Friday that will keep you busy with all sorts of helpful writing advice, plus she's an amazing photographer and provides lots of tips for seeing creatively for photos (and writing).

Susan Fields gave me the Happiness award
Medeia Sharif gave me the Who's Awesome Award
Laurel at Laurel's Leaves and Quinn at Seeing, Dreaming, Writing gave me the One Lovely Blog award
Joanne at a ZigZag Road gave me the Sweet Friends award

These are all fellow writers and excellent bloggers with all sorts of helpful and fun posts. If you haven't discovered them yet, you are missing out.

I'm passing the awards on to some other great blogs that I enjoy on a regular basis - and all of these bloggers that I mention are just wonderful about returning comments, too.

• Debbie at Writing While the Rice Boils - another high altitude writer!
• Jess at Falling Leaflets - tons of great resources, and you have to see her pirate post
• Amie McCracken at i AM alive - writing from Germany
• Shelley Moore Thomas at StoryQueen's StoryCastle - MG writer and always thought-provoking
• Rosslyn Elliot - she has a historical coming out soon! "Reading books, reading people, writing faith"
• Terri at Terri Tiffany Inspirational Writer - she truly IS inspirational to me as a writer
• Lisa at Paranormal Point of View - interviews with fantastical characters
• Margo Kelly - she has a cool name (don't you think? smile), and she has a fun twist on agents' rules
• Rebecca at StickyNoteStories: a nuclear chemist who writes "when I’m not blowing things up"
• And finally, Quinn at Seeing, Dreaming...Writing - I already mentioned him because he gave me an award but I've enjoyed his blog so much this fall that I simply had to pass back an award.

I didn't post pictures of all the awards, 'cause see, I'm being tricky, I'm making you go visit other blogs to find them - because the blogs are worth visiting. Go forth and choose your favorite award:

Pick up the Beautiful Blogger award at Stina'a blog
Pick up the Happiness award at Susan's blog
Pick up the One Lovely Blog award at Laurel's blog or at Quinn's
Pick up the Who's Awesome award at Medeia's blog
Pick up the Sweet Friends award at Joanne's blog

That's all for now and I will catch-up with you all in Decemeber. Wish me luck with the 50,000 new words!