Jill Williamson is a chocolate loving, daydreaming, creator of kingdoms. She writes weird books for teens in lots of weird genres like, fantasy (Blood of Kings trilogy), science fiction (Replication), and dystopian (The Safe Lands trilogy). Find Jill on FacebookTwitterPinterest, or on her author website.

NaNoWriMo is almost here! Who’s in?

I wanted to give you NaNo participants some encouragement before you dove in. So here goes…

1. Give yourself permission to write ugly.

2. No editing! It doesn’t have to make sense. It’s all about writing fast.

3. If you get stuck, skip ahead and write a scene you’re excited about. Then later, when you’re in bed or showering or cleaning or in the car, think through that stuck scene until you’ve worked your way through it and are excited about it.

4. Also if you get stuck, try interviewing your character. You might delete it all later, but you’ll add words and learn something new about your character.

5. Stay off the Internet! It will only distract you. Write comments in Track Changes with notes of things you’ll need to come back and do later.

6. If you have to go online, use it as a reward system. Once you type 1000 words, you can go online for ten minutes. Type another thousand, you get ten more minutes of Internet time. This also works well for me with chocolate bribes. On the writing retreat, I put the candy bar where I could see it, but just out of reach. And I knew that once I finished my chapter, I could have it!

Hope that helps. I can’t wait to hear how you all do. Good luck! And many words to you all.