Some Recommended Reading: NaNoWriMo Edition

Are you doing it? How many pages per day, so far? Here's some inspiration for your writintg;

Neil Gaiman, "Why our future depends on libraries, reading and daydreaming" --- One bit from the middle of this lecture, The Reading Agency annual lecture on the future of reading and libraries with a focus on young people:

I was once in New York, and I listened to a talk about the building of private prisons – a huge growth industry in America. The prison industry needs to plan its future growth – how many cells are they going to need? How many prisoners are there going to be, 15 years from now? And they found they could predict it very easily, using a pretty simple algorithm, based on asking what percentage of 10 and 11-year-olds couldn't read. And certainly couldn't read for pleasure.

It's not one to one: you can't say that a literate society has no criminality. But there are very real correlations.

And I think some of those correlations, the simplest, come from something very simple. Literate people read fiction.

 6 Things You Should Never Write About for NaNoWriMo --- and I'm going to list them here, but you should read the whole article to get the bits about WHY you shouldn't write about these:

---Safe things
---Boring things
---Overdone things
---Wish fulfillment things
---Predictable things
---Personal things

8 Ways to Explain NaNoWriMo to Your Non-Writer Friends --- I love them all, but I'm not going to list them all here. Read the article. You'll love it, I promise. Oh, well, here's one: "What about your job?" (Not really a way to explain it, but read the bit.)



And here's the NaNoWriMo blog. Nah, don't read it. It's a waste of time. But I had to include it, right?
Wait, I just saw a good tweet on this blog, a prompt: "Talk less. Smile more." But they didn't even attribute this quote, which is Aaron Burr talking to Alexander Hamilton in the musical "Hamilton." Duh. Always attribute your quotes, folks on Twitter.

Oh, wait, they did attribute it in the next tweet. And explained why they included it. So go ahead and read this if you want. I'm certainly not stopping you!

Finally, this post from 2011, "49 Best Blogs for NaNoWriMo Support" --- I didn't check all the links to see if they still work, but, hey, if you see a blog title that looks helpful, and particularly if you need help with your procrastination, go ahead and check 'em out.