Nanowrimo & Bite-Size Edits

Every November, hundreds of thousands of writers commit themselves to the maddest of madnesses: writing a 50,000-word novel in one month, for Nanowrimo, the National Novel Writing Month.

It’s a time of creativity, chaos, angst, nerves, procrastination, excitement, and sheer folly, a colossal celebration of passion for the written word.

It’s also a time, let’s face it, of some text in dire need of copy editing.

Of course, when you have to pump out 1,700 words every day, there’s no time for copy editing: much like Lot’s wife, Nanowrimoers are counseled against looking back; to think of the next sentence, not the one before.

That’s where Book Oven and Bite-Size Edits come in. Because, chances are, your Nanowrimo novel will need a bit of work when you are done. But what if some of your friends could help you clean up your novel as you go? A team of cheerleaders / proofreaders, who edit just a few sentences every day to make sure your howlers get cleaned. The beauty of it is: they don’t have to read the whole chapter or the whole book! Just random sentences. If you have 15 people helping you, they just need to edit 10 sentences a day; 10 people just need to edit 15 sentences. So you don’t need to be (too) embarrassed by your unpolished prose.

Here is how it works:

1. Go to http://bookoven.com and register for an account
2. Create a new project, and tag it “nanowrimo” (you can make your project public or private)
3. Invite a group of friends, or fellow writers to be proofreaders
4. Every day, post your finished Nanowrimo text into a new chapter
5. Turn on Bite-Size Edits
6. Send a message to your team of proofreaders, letting them know a new text is ready for editing (be sure to include the URL to Bite-Size Edits for the project)
7. When Nanowrimo is done, you can accept/reject/modify the edits made by your team
8. And then, when you’re ready to look at the novel again, you’ll have a clean copy of your text ready to polish into something wonderful (or to make you shudder with shame!)

If you’d like to try out Bite-Size Edits, you can play around with Andrew Dobbs’ book, “Traveler”:
http://bookoven.com/projects/225/bitesizeedit/

Or David Nygren’s book, “Boy/Girl” (probably rated R):
http://bookoven.com/projects/233/bitesizeedit/