Are you going to take the Camp NaNoWriMo challenge this month? To help GalleyCat writers with the challenge, we’ve rounded up three year’s worth of writing advice in a single post.

National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) takes place every November, but the organizers created the online camp to give writers an alternative time for the writing challenge. Every year, we publish daily links to writing tools and tips during the NaNoWriMo challenge in November.

We’ve collected the individual posts below–the advice will work all year round.

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Want to write a novel in April? You should take the Camp NaNoWriMo challenge next week.

National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) takes place every November, but the organizers created the online camp to give writers an alternative time for the writing challenge. Here are some of the new features:

The Word-Count Archery Range: Maybe, for whatever reason, 50K just wasn’t the right fit for you. Thankfully, you can now adjust your targets and take aim at a word-count goal anywhere from 10K to 999,999. …Your Camp Cabin: Do you need silence to concentrate on writing your novel? Or do you find flashes of genius in the chatter of your fellow cabinmates? Choose your bunkmates based on age, shared genre, similar word-count goal, activity level, or by name! … The Arts and Crafts Tent: We’ve got some beautiful web badges ready for you to trumpet your participation at Camp.

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Want to write a novel in April? You should take the Camp NaNoWriMo challenge in April or July.

National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) takes place every November, but the Office of Letters and Light (the nonprofit behind NaNoWriMo and the Young Writers Program) wanted to give writers an alternative time for the writing challenge. Here are some of the new features:

The Word-Count Archery Range: Maybe, for whatever reason, 50K just wasn’t the right fit for you. Thankfully, you can now adjust your targets and take aim at a word-count goal anywhere from 10K to 999,999. … Your Camp Cabin: Do you need silence to concentrate on writing your novel? Or do you find flashes of genius in the chatter of your fellow cabinmates? Choose your bunkmates based on age, shared genre, similar word-count goal, activity level, or by name! … The Arts and Crafts Tent: We’ve got some beautiful web badges ready for you to trumpet your participation at Camp.

The Office of Letters & Light, the nonprofit behind the National Novel Writing Month marathon, is up for a Project Awesome 2012 grant.  If you want to support the group, you can vote for the NaNoWriMo video at the Project for Awesome site.

Here’s more about the video: ”This is vitally important because we’re short of our 2012 break-even fundraising goal to bring NaNoWriMo back better than ever in 2013. Getting this grant would be the fundraising equivalent of writing 10,000 words on the next-to-last day of NaNoWriMo. To receive the grant, we need you to vote for a video about the Office of Letters and Light—by today’s deadline—made by the hilarious musical Wrimos, Debs and Errol. The charities promoted in the top five videos split all of the money. As of now, we’d get a percentage of $180,000, and that figure is rising!”

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Jennifer Bresnick has won Shelf Unbound’s first annual writing competition for Best Self-Published Book. Her debut novel, The Last Death of Tev Chrisini, was among 800 entries.

Bresnick began writing her book during National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) 2009. From there, she self-published it using Amazon’s CreateSpace. The Kindle edition was released in March 2012 and the paperback version followed one month later.

Shelf Unbound publisher Margaret Brown had this statement in the announcement: “Bresnick’s enchanting Tolkien-esque epic fantasy The Last Death of Tev Chrisini captivated our judges from page one and held us in thrall through its conclusion 467 pages later. We fell in love with the story and its characters with Bresnick’s assured literary tale-spinning.”

National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) ended last night as writers around the world counted a collective total of 3,288,976,325 words this year–215 million more words than last year.

As these writers toiled away, we published daily links to writing tools and tips. We’ve collected the individual posts below–the advice will work all year round.

Here is our final piece of advice: Take a break and then edit like crazy. Remember your NaNoWriMo manuscript is just a draft and it takes  A LOT more work to publish.

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Congratulations to all the National Novel Writing Month writers in the GalleyCat audience for surviving another year with the writing marathon. Romance writers can even consider submitting your NaNoWriMo novel to Avon Impulse. But don’t forget–you still need to edit!

In 90 days, you should take the National Novel Editing Month challenge and clean up your masterpiece. Follow this link to explore our growing collection of editing tools as well.

Here’s more about NaNoEdMO: “Have you written a 50,000 word novel but haven’t edited it yet? Then you’ve come to the right place! It is here that people from all over the world gather together to spend 50 hours in March editing their novels. This is not as easy as it might sound but the forums are available to get advice and ask all the important questions you may have. Advice from real published authors will also be here to help you and a certificate of completion awaits each winner at the end of the month.”

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As National Novel Writing Month writers near the end of the marathon, many have spent all of their best ideas in the manuscript.

Everybody should visit Hatch’s Plot Bank to fill your literary checkbook. This collection of thousands of ideas for writers could help you jump-start a scene or wrap up your NaNoWriMo novel. Check it out:

This site is designed to help novel, short story, movie, television, play, and video game writers develop new plot ideas. Over 2000 scenarios ranging from the normal to the bizarre are provided as a spark for the imagination. Some plots are sitcom cliches (that might deserve a new twist) while others are unusual happenings gleaned from the world of news and a few odd minds. Other story ideas are subtle suggestions that could be taken several ways – according to your mood or whim at the moment. Some others are everyday situations given an interesting wrinkle. Take a look for yourself.

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As we near the end of National Novel Writing Month, we’d like to remind all the marathon writers to exercise. You should check out AppNewser’s collection of 5 Free Fitness Apps for Writers to make sure you stay healthy while writing.

If you want to put more exercise and movement in your life, the free Writers on the Move Facebook group can help.

Check it out: “We are a low-pressure, low-commitment group meant to assist members in inspiring ourselves first in an effort to inspire the group. WOTM is an open, private group and anyone can ask to join. Unlike most groups for writers, we don’t talk much about writing. Instead, we all contribute to a context that helps keep us accountable to our exercise goals. What kind of exercising do we do? All kinds. What kind of writing do we do? Who knows we never talk about it. We are too busy checking in about how we are doing getting and staying moving.”

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As we near the nail-biting conclusion of National Novel Writing Month, we have some simple advice for all the undoubtedly frazzled writers in the marathon: have a drink. This GalleyCat editor created a variation on The Thin Man martini this summer–try our recipe at this link.

If you want more cocktail options, Studio 360 hosted a Fuzzy Novel competition this summer, collecting more than 100 cocktails mixed by listeners and named after famous books.

Brett Elms won the contest with the The Age of Innocence cocktail and Susan Steinway was the runner-up with the My Antonia. Bartender, poet and author Rosie Schaap mixed the winning drink in the video embedded above. Follow this link to listen to the whole episode.

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