This post is about a different kind of contract—it’s the contract you make with yourself as a writer.
Thanks to National Novel Writing Month—NaNoWriMo—November has become an annual fest of unfettered word-cranking.
Participants are encouraged to write at least 50,000 words from scratch. Your inner wordsmith gets the keys to a gassed-up muscle car and an endless row of green lights. Your internal editor gets locked in the trunk or ditched at the rest stop.
What’s new this year is that a computer-book publisher I’m starting to edit and acquire for, Pragmatic Bookshelf, is encouraging would-be high-tech authors to write in November. The result is editor/author Daniel Steinberg’s PragProWriMo.
No participating authors are under any obligation to submit their results to Pragmatic, and I’m not directly involved—I’m just cheering this on. (Personally, I may do NaNoWriMo to finally finish my coming-of-age novel!)
Here are the PragProWriMo mechanics:
If you are on Twitter, just tweet when you have finished your writing for the day. Use the tag #pragprowrimo and let us know what you wrote and how it went.
If you’re not on Twitter go ahead and post your progress in the comments to this blog. Somewhere you need to declare what you’ve done. It will keep you writing.
The only rule is to keep writing. Other than that, have fun and check back in with us to let us know how it’s going.
Deadlines work, and I hope this helps! Leave a comment to let us know if you’re trying NaNoWriMo or PragProWriMo!
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