Finished NaNoWriMo 2008

I finished my third effort at NaNoWriMo early yesterday morning -- the last day of November. NaNoWriMo is an event that asks you to write a 50,000 word novel during the month of November (thus: National Novel Writing Month). As Piers Anthony, author of 137 novels to date, says in one of NaNoWriMo's soi-disant Pep Talks (they are actual weekly emails):

You're a fool. You know that, don't you? Because only a fool would try a stunt as crazy as this. You want to write a 50,000 word novel in one month?! Do you have sawdust in your skull? When there are so many other more useful things you could be doing, like cleaning up the house and yard, taking a correspondence course in Chinese, or contributing your time and effort to a charitable cause? Whatever is possessing you?

and then continues a bit later...

So maybe you won't be a successful novelist, or even a good one. At least you are trying. T hat, would you believe, puts you in a rarefied one percent of our kind. Maybe less than that. You aspire to something better than the normal rat race. You may not accomplish much, but it's the attitude that counts. As with mutations: 99% of them are bad and don't survive, but the 1% that are better are responsible for the evolution of species to a more fit state. You know the odds are against you, but who knows? If you don't try, you'll never be sure whether you might, just maybe, possibly, have done it. So you do have to make the effort, or be forever condemned in your own bleary eyes.

My novel, called "The Zythophile", is about a young man and his quest to brew the perfect beer, and have someone recognize him for that effort. He goes to the World Beer Cup, which is held in Portland (in the novel) and gives it a shot, despite troubles with a terrorist chasing him, and the fact that the beer is alive.

You can read the first 8,000 words here.
Ok, don't read the excerpt. That's good not to read it because it's really just a dump of my brain onto paper. Even I haven't read it, except for the previous couple of paragraphs each time I started to write. This is just a lump of granite. As Katherine Paterson, author of Bridge to Terabithia said in her Pep Talk:

I live in Barre, Vermont which calls itself the "Granite Capital of the World." Outside our town are enormous quarries, so when I speak in local schools every child has a mental picture of a granite quarry. "You know how hard it is to get granite out of the quarry," I say. "You have to carefully score the rock and put the explosive in to make the great granite block break loose from the face of the stone. Then you have to attach the block to the chains so that the cranes can lift it slowly out of the hole a nd put it on the waiting truck. That’s the first draft. It’s hard, dangerous work, and when you’ve finished, all you’ve really got is a block of stone. But now you have something now to work on. Now you can take your block down to the shed to carve and polish it and turn it into something of beauty. That’s revision."

Now I have to ask, is there a NaNoRevMo?

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