Rochelle Bradley Author

Hi.  My name is Shari. My Nano name is Archadia, and I write Christian Fiction. I joined NaNo in 2011 after my husband passed away. It had been several months, and I was looking for ways to express myself/find myself, get out of the house, and meet new people. A friend had told me about this a couple of years before, but I had too much on my plate. In 2011, my daughter asked me if I wanted to do this with her and I jumped at the opportunity. Unfortunately, I had made too many commitments, and nano was the first to go. I didn't come close to my goal, and just kind of forgot about it over the next few years. Life got in the way again, but I was always journaling.  One day in 2015, I was going through my journals and came across this document without a title.  I read it and thought, "wow! This is really good!  I wonder who wrote it and how it got in my google docs?"  Slowly, it came back to me that it was the piece I had started in...

National Novel Writing Month healed me. If you ask the Dayton, Ohio, NaNo group, those who know me likely consider me a prolific writer.  I can hammer out seven hundred words in a fifteen-minute word war and have little problem writing fifty thousand words in less than three weeks.  I'm focused and intense, man! But I didn't always live in Dayton.  For the previous three years before my first NaNo, I lived in Miami, Florida.  It was the most consistently miserable time in my adult life.  I felt trapped, I didn't have many friends, I didn't want to go anywhere.  While I was in Miami, I finished a couple of short stories, but that's all.  Prolific?  Pshaw.  I'd be lucky to write at all in the course of a month.  I was seriously concerned that I had lost the ability to write, lost the magic that allowed me to express myself in words, and was trying to adjust to the idea that I wasn't a writer, after all.  It was a rough adjust...

When writing, you're going to get stuck.  You'll be sitting at your computer or your notepad, and you'll wonder "what happens next?" My A#1 writing buddy, Her Imperial Highness, Princess Irulan It is my experience that many of you will wait for inspiration.  You'll want for a white-limbed goddess to whisper something into your ear that thrills you, fires your soul, makes your mind race.  Then, only then, will you rush to your place of work and the words will flow from your fingertips like wine into a glass. However, muses are fickle, and you've got a deadline. The most practical advice, then, that I can give is: kill your muse .  She'll try to talk you out of it; do not listen.  She'll beseech and beg; ignore her.  Others will plead on her behalf; reject them.  Take your muse out back, put a gun to her head, and scatter her brains on the ground.  Then leave her face down in a ditch for the badgers and coyotes, return to your place...

When I'm wearing the hat, don't bother me - it's NaNo time! Hello! I’m zenWriter42. I haven’t committed to NaNo 2016…yet. I’m juggling what amounts to four part-time jobs right now, including teaching four college writing classes, and the hours just aren’t there. But s ince I first discovered National Novel Writing Month in 2005, after reading Chris Baty’s No Plot, No Problem! , I’ve been a devoted fan and evangelist. My 2005 NaNo effort became the basis for my creative writing thesis; my 2006 draft, after many rewrites, edits and revisions, was released by Deadly Writes Publishing as my debut novel Forty & Out in 2014. In addition, I’ve published a number short stories, several anthologized personal essays , and a non-fiction history book . NaNo was not the end for me, only the beginning. It gave me the confidence to push forward with my writing, knowing I really could finish a novel-length manuscript. After a few years’ hiatus to finish college (unde...

“I write romance novels.”  This phase took me years to be comfortable writing and then saying to the world.  There can be an inherent bias associated with writing the “bodice rippers.”  My first (and still incomplete novel) was fantasy.  I spent my first Nano year writing in the fantasy genre and to be honest, it was a miserable experience.  Fifty thousand words remained elusive, but my goal was to move from the coveted ground of writer to published author.  So I continued to plod through what I thought was a commercially viable book.                  By the time Camp Nano 2015 rolled around, I had what felt like an incurable case of writer’s block.  Allowing myself the freedom to step away from the carefully plotted outline of my first book, I decided to write short blocks of whatever came into my head for ten minutes just to get the juices flowing.  By the end...

I started doing NanoWrimo in 2010. I was working as an IT and graphic design instructor at a local technical college. My Dean had recently tasked me with overseeing and advising the creative writing club at our school. Having had much experience and a college degree in writing I knew that often, creative writing clubs rapidly devolved into support groups. I had been there and it’s okay, it just wasn’t something that I wanted to do. I advised the club as I was asked to but I was taciturn and not terribly excited by the work that the students were bringing in and even less interested in being a psychiatrist.  When October rolled around, I was still rolling my eyes at yet another student writing their horrific life story except that they were a billionaire, cowboy, spaceman with laser eyes. (I should note here that I have no problem with billionaire, cowboy, spacemen with laser eyes. It just gets a little tiresome after reading hundreds of them - I digress...) A friend of mine and ...