Hey guys! November's been a hectic month for me (and all of you I'm sure!) This is my first year writing a novel while being in a public school so it's been an insane challenge. Personally I was ready to quit Saturday and then on Sunday... I wrote 12,000 words! So it's not too late for you to catch up and push that extra little boost into your novel to win if you're behind.

If you've already won or are right on track good for you. Go eat a cookie and get on with normal life.

Here's a few tips to boost that word count a bit and they're right out of the NaNoWriMo handbook... so not cheating!

1) Open your novel and find the find-and-replace button. Take a name say Mary. Replace all Mary's with Mary Ellen. Viola you just doubled your character's name hence doubling your word count. Or if you have fantasy novel there's always something along the lines of "Sir evil overlord of the 7 deadly worlds of Killomonthernaigarain and ruler of all the lands". Or even just because you badly need the words you can do what I did to my character which was change her name from "Citadel" to "Citadel the fierce warrior that goes through a lot of bad stuff but finally finds true love in the end." If you're way behind or wanted to quit this is a great way to boost your WC so you can pull off an epic last minute win!

2) De-hyphenate. Did you know that 'not-so-great-of-an-idea' only counts as one word? Delete all the -'s in your novel if you can! While this will loose you grammar points (psshhhh who needs grammar anyways?) it'll gain you more words.

3) Inflict one of your characters with deafness or a stutter! If they're deaf things have to be repeated over, and over, and over and over... (anything from wax in the ear to a loud rock concert the night before as the good NaNo book says.) Stuttering means they just have to keep saying words over and over and over. Instant word depth.

4) Add in a really long hallucination or dream that makes no sense, is completely random and maybe even just gibberish.  'Nuff said.

5) Add in 'Blooper' chapters. They can span from anything to giving you two main OC's love potions, to writing in a star wars cameo to getting your MC roaring drunk to you going into the novel and getting beat up by your characters to The Ember Island Players (from Avatar Last Airbender) giving a horrible rendition of your novel's plot. The sky's the limit and these blooper chapters can be a great break from the main novel its self.

If you've given up... come back and try to finish! Even if you don't hit 50k or your word goal, set a smaller one for yourself. Say you're at 15k, promise yourself to hit 25k by Friday just so you kept writing. If you're almost there, don't give up! If I can go from 16,000 words to 38,000 words in 4 days you can too!

That's all guys, keep writing and keep being awesome!
Huzzah!

AJ