My phone rang the other day and on the other end of it was none other than Chris Baty, founder and head honcho of National Novel Writing Month, or NaNoWriMo (and local writer.) Of course, I burst out laughing immediately, imagining the massive trouble I was about to get in for my snarky NaNoWriMo post about a month ago. However, Mr. Baty was nothing short of delightful. He didn’t want a personal apology, he wanted to confirm whether or not agents really do see an increase in queries every December (we do). Imagine that… he had never heard of this particular phenomenon!
We talked about why NaNoWriMo is awesome for writers, but we also happened to discuss why revision is oh-so-important, among many other writer/agent/publishing issues. Long story short, I’m going to do a guest blog post over on the NaNo blog in a few days about the importance of revision. I’ll post a link when it’s up and ready to go. What a perfect extra way to get myself, you all and, now, the greater NaNo community of writers even more pumped about Revision-o-Rama!
Mr. Baty sounds like a typical extrovert… going around causing problems for others 😉
Oh wow. I would have freaked at that phone call too. But it sounds like it got something really good started!
Bane — Would you know something about this yourself, perhaps? 🙂
Lynn — No freaking out, just a good laugh. He really couldn’t have been nicer and seemed surprised, himself, that NaNo writers would query come December 1st… and boast about their manuscripts being a NaNo book in their queries.
Not the extrovert part — definitely the troublemaking part (perfect case of middle-child syndrome going on here 🙂 )
I cannot believe that writers would submit that quickly, when what they’re sending is essentially a rough draft. I can write a manuscript in three to six weeks, but it takes me many months to perfect it.
Do you see a difference in the quality of work from self-acknowledged NaNo manuscripts this time of year in comparison with submissions during other times of the year?
I almost did not believe it either, why would anyone think that after 30 days a novel would be ready to seen by any other human especially an agent??
I’m looking forward to Revison-o-Rama!
That rocks, Mary!
I know I’m awfully late to the party on this one, but having just made my new year’s resolution to finish my novel by the end of the year, I was wondering if that might also be a reason that you get an up-tick in queries in December? 🙂
Sue — That could definitely play a part!