Nanowrimo: National Write a Book Month / If Only it WERE that Easy

We need this? There isn't enough terrible stuff being published that we are now going to encourage people who have no business writing a book to sit down and blast one out in thirty days? I have to say having spent six months writing one that I thought might be worth something... Good luck. After finishing I let it sit for a few months and went back to read it again. It is still stored in my computer and the copyright for it is in a filing cabinet somewhere but it will never see the light of day. And mind you I have a degree that says I should be able to do this job effectively.

Don't get me wrong everyone should write something every day. I do. You're reading it right now. Sometimes it's good sometimes it's not. But never in a million years would I think I could sit down for an hour or two a day and whip out a novel. I need more than a month to just think out a plot line. Another month to outline characters... Oh yeah, I know some of you are wondering just why it takes so long for me to do these things when you can scratch it down during a commercial breaks in Desperate Housewives. Let me know when you're on the best seller list.

All good stuff takes time, thought, planning, editing, and reworking, and more reworking, and more editing, and after all of that you are going to want someone smarter than you to read it and edit it and rework it some more. Nothing ticks me off quite the way paying good money for a tired plot line I have figured out by page ten and characters that are about as deep as the tread on my ten year old tires does. It's a waste of a perfectly good tree to cover it in that graffiti. What annoys me even more is when the people publishing the book don't bother to proof read it or edit it. I can understand the occasional typo getting by but when there are three on one six inch page with two run on sentences and an incomplete paragraph that ends without even a hint of punctuation I get annoyed and toss the thing in the recycle bin.

With the advance of technology and digital readers the books may cost less but my annoyance will be greater. Not only will I have paid for it but now I will have taken the time to log on, download it and wasted the batteries to look at it. I guess if you average all that out it's about the same price. I'm not saying there shouldn't be any trashy writing, it has its audience and they are the same people who think you can rip off a novel worth spit in thirty days. I am of the opinion there is already enough of this kind of stuff being produced that we don't need to encourage more. All you have to do is check out the refuse on the shelves of the local closeout or dollar store to see just how many of these books are produced every year before word of mouth warns the rest of the general public to steer clear.

Be safe.