Mystery author Mark Terry isn't a fan of NaNoMoWri (National Novel Writing Month). See NaNoWriMo & Me.

I've never been a NaNo fan either, as I explained in a comment on Mark's blog. My reaction, when asked if I would do it has always been "Nah, no."

For one thing the 50,000 words NaNoMoWri participants aim for isn't generally considered a novel by publishers these days except in the Young Adult genre. So even if you reach the goal, you still don't have novel.

Then too my composition method is get it right the first time as nearly as possible. There are writers who prefer to dash things off -- to get something -- anything -- down and then clean it up afterwards. I worry about starting off with a manuscript that's too broken to ever fix.

Besides, why rush through a book, simply to produce a given number of words per day? Are we working an assembly line?

Now maybe, just maybe, I'm leery of the concept because I'm a literary sloth. To successfully complete NaNoMoWri you need to crank out 1,600 words a day and I rarely do. To manage that trick 30 days running would be difficult if not impossible. For me. A guy I know once completed his NaNo novel in two and a half days. So this November he's writing two.

And then there's the legendary French author Georges Simenon who claimed he locked himself in a hotel room for several days to write a new Maigret novel at one go. But, well, he was a legend.

Maybe I'm saying NaNo just isn't for me. Everyone has their own writing method.

Hmmmm. I notice I've just written two letters to correspondents, plus some blog comments, which along with this blog come to well over 2,000 words today. And I do love those short, gritty fifties crime fiction novels. Hey, maybe next year.