If you're reading this in a reader, you might want to click through to my actual site so you can admire the shiny new Cybils nominees widget. Mine rotates through all our fantastic YA Fiction nominees (so you can sympathize with me when I tell you that we have a Very Hard Job ahead of us to narrow this list down to 5-7... oy!). Like what you see? You can get one of your very own! Choose the categories you want to show and customize the colors to compliment your site. Very, very cool.
And my novel is coming along, slowly but surely. I know that there are some authors out there who object to the idea of NaNoWriMo, an attempt to write a 50,000 word novel during the month of November. I can see their point. After all, they work hard for months and months (or years and years) to perfect their manuscripts and I can see how it might be offensive to them that thousands of people call themselves "authors" and "novelists" after a 30-day writing frenzy.
For me, though, it's just fun. I don't intend to become a writer (although I guess I would never say never). And I don't typically brag about the fact that I'm working on my fifth novel (because then people might want to read my novels and, well, all of my novels are... very not good). NaNoWriMo is an outlet for me to be creative with a support group of thousands of other people who are also being creative. It's an excuse to let go and to write something that I know is bad and to not care that it's bad.
I have been finding this year's novel hard going. Um, in fact, I hate this year's novel. But yesterday I gave my main characters X-men-like super powers and I think I'm starting to like it a bit more. I passed the halfway mark this weekend and I'm up to 27,469. And I hope that the second 25k is going to be much easier and more fun than the first 25k.
Here's hoping, anyway...