Melissa Maygrove

  This is my   Insecure Writers Support Group   post for November 2022. Alex's awesome co-hosts this month  are:  Diedre Knight,   Douglas Thomas Greening,   Nick Wilford,   and  Diane Burton! Please stop by their blogs and say thank you .  💻💻💻💻💻 November 2nd question - November is National Novel Writing Month. Have you ever participated? If not, why not? Nope. I'm one of those authors who wishes NaNoWriMo participants well then disappears for the rest of November.  Why? I work full time in addition to my writing. And,  because of the holidays,  November and December are two of the busiest months of the year. There's just no way I could squeeze in writing a novel, so I don't even try. Honestly, I often shake my head at whomever chose November for this. Maybe it's because the kids are finally settled into school, and the weather is turning too cold (up north, at least) to be outside much, but I don't get it.  I mi...

A few weeks ago, I tried something new, and it really sped up my drafting.  After reading about how--doing basically the same thing--Ava Jae over at Writability Won NaNoWriMo In 9 Days , I thought I'd post this for my writer friends who are struggling to make their word count. I typically write very clean, meaning I'm a picky polisher in my initial draft. It's closer to publish-ready than most, but it takes me forever. Besides research, the main thing that slows me down is coming up with fresh ways to describe emotion, movement, facial expression, etc.  I decided to try something different if I found myself really stuck. ( You know....when you sit there for twenty minutes , debating about a single phrase or word, and draw nothing but an icky cliche or a total mental blank. :P )   I started putting a note-to-self ( e.g. Show Harrison's outrage. ) or a cliched/bad version of what I was aiming for in brackets, and then letting go and moving on. I've left...