NaNo Tip of the Week--Week 5 of NaNo 2022

  

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Welcome to week 5 of National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo)! The focus for today is celebration. The goal for today is 1,667 words for the day with a total of 48,343 words. For Reverse NaNo folks, the goal is 116 words for the day with a total of 49,999 words.

Completing NaNo always feels like graduation to me. Congratulations!! Throw your mortar board and tassel in the air!!

With less than 48 hours left, what are you going to do to celebrate once you hit the win button? 

November 29 is Louisa May Alcott’s Birthday!

Alcott’s best-known work is Little Women, published in 1868, which is loosely based on her life in 1800s Massachusetts as the second of four daughters.  She wrote three sequels to Little Women, plus many other novels and short stories.

Other authors who lived during her time, some of whom were family friends, are Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry David Thoreau, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Margaret Fuller, and Julia Ward Howe.

Louisa served as a nurse during the Civil War, and was active as a feminist and abolitionist.  She never married.

In 1888 at age 55, she died of a stroke in Boston.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louisa_May_Alcott

https://www.britannica.com/biography/Louisa-May-Alcott

https://www.womenshistory.org/education-resources/biographies/louisa-may-alcott

https://louisamayalcott.org/

Have you read Little Women or any of the sequels? What did you think of it? Tell us in the comments!

 

Query Friday: Take a Break

 

In my quest for writerly wisdom, I’ve often stumbled upon the advice to make writing a daily habit.

But never that querying should be.

 

In fact, in my experience, constant querying can be bad for the soul.

If you are exhibiting any of the following symptoms it may be time for a break:

 

1) You're not hearing back.

 

2) You've revised your query a thousand times

3) You find yourself checking QueryTracker 9,000 times a day

 

4) You've gotten hit again and again with rejection

It's okay to pause querying and focus on more well filling pursuits.

Rejection will be there when you're ready for it, but that pie may not be.

Updated NaNo word count for interested parties as of 11/24/22: