Is anyone reading here joining in NaNoWriMo? November is National Novel Writing Month, and last year there were 59,000 participants in this crazy month-long writing jamboree.

I’m in, I think. At least I signed up, and I’ve been jotting notes into a couple of computer files the past week. A few people in my online writing group are signed up as well, and they’re all involved in local kick-off parties this weekend.

Instead of attending novel writing parties, I’m helping out at two Fall Carnivals — at my kids’ school and at our church. My husband and I are actually manning the “football booth” at one of the carnivals, so that should be interesting.

But my head is in the clouds a little bit, and I’m still dreaming of writing a novel. I’ve given some thought lately to the genre. I’ve read a lot of great Christian fiction lately and have decided I’m a huge fan of humorous chick-lit and mom-lit — Kristin Billerbeck and Tracey Bateman both whisk me away by making me laugh.

I don’t see how these women do it. Tracey and Kristin are around my age, both have four children, and yet they write CBA-bestselling novels. Tracey’s publicist sent me her Claire Knows Best book, and I felt like I’d just met my new best friend when I met her character, Claire Everett. You’ll love her too, if you like humorous mom-lit. Somehow Tracey has found time to publish 25 books — and did I mention she’s my age?

Both these novelists cut their teeth on writing romance. Did you know half of all fiction sold is romance? It’s a multi-billion-dollar industry. But I don’t want to write adult romance. At least not now. That seems kind of weird to me, like sneaking around to watch another couple kiss. You’ve really got to live with your characters to write about them — and I don’t want to live with another couple.

I’m not a chick-lit writer either because I just don’t know all that much about fashion and shoes — and you’ve really got to if you jump in that genre. Allison Bottke’s character Dee in A Stitch in Time is a fashion aficionado, and all of Kristin’s characters are into shoes, handbags, the works. Unfortunately, I’m not into shoes — can’t be, unless I want to sell a car or maybe our house. My shoes come from Target or wherever else I can find something on sale. I don’t even look at the name brand — just see if it fits and doesn’t hurt to wear.

But writing for kids — now it’s no problem for me to listen to how kids talk, see what they’re interested in, what they’re reading. Why not write stories my kids would want to read? I was praying for inspiration yesterday and took my fivesome to the library after school to replenish our book supply. I wandered through the kids’ stacks and noticed which authors have a shelf full of books.

Judy Blume, of course, still selling books she wrote 30 years ago. Beverly Cleary — what a wonderful writer — didn’t she have fun living with her character, Ramona Quimby, a few years? Betsy Byars has two shelves in our library — I checked out her memoir about three years ago, and so I checked it out again yesterday to see if I could find one of my all-time favorite quotes. (I just visited her website, and she’s still going strong from her home in South Carolina — she’s published over 60 books since 1962, including the Newbery medal-winning Summer of the Swans.)

Ah … found it. From Betsy Byars, The Moon and I. Betsy tells her readers, “Plenty of good scraps are as important in making a book as in the making of a quilt. I often think of my books as scrapbooks of my life, because I put into them all the neat things that I see and read and hear. I sometimes wonder what people who don’t write do with all their good stuff.”

And here’s another quote that made me laugh. Betsy is a mother of four, and she started writing back in the late 50s when she had two children. There’s a picture of her family in the book, with her husband and two oldest. The caption reads: “Urbana, Illinois, 1956. Behind us are the barracks where I began to write. I really had two choices — write or lose my mind.”

Ha! I can relate. Writing is a good thing to do when you have little kids in the house and you feel like you’ve lost a sense of who you are, but you don’t want to lose your mind.

Yesterday, my 18-month-old pulled some books off a bookshelf in our living room, and when I went to put them back up later, I saw this book that I’d forgotten about, Novelist’s Boot Camp: 101 Ways to Take Your Book from Boring to Bestseller.

So that’s what I’m reading through this weekend as I prepare to write next week. My plan is to hold all my email correspondence and take some time away from the blog — and pour all my word count into this novel. It’s a plot I thought of a couple of years ago, and I started writing it, but then our computer crashed for two weeks, and I lost it. That’s when I decided I’d focus on personal essay writing and devotionals for a while. Which I’ve done for two years now.

I’ve also had this character in mind since I was 19. I wrote about her in freshman composition — while everyone else in my class wrote adult short stories, I wrote about Sadie. I wrote about her again in my children’s literature class, and my professor asked me to read my story to the class, and they laughed at the right places. So I think this Sadie character is pretty funny.

My daughter had a friend over a couple of weeks ago, and I couldn’t believe it when her friend started saying, “I’m crazy about Japan. I wish I could learn Japanese. I want to go there someday so bad.” What!! I started speaking some Japanese to her, and I got out my Nihongo dictionary and showed her the characters and how to write her name in katakana. I kept wanting to listen to this little girl talk, and it turns out her big sister is also crazy about Japan, and wants to go live there when she graduates from high school.

So I invited their family for supper, and that night, we got out my Japanese scrapbook, and they were fascinated. This was just more fodder for my imagination. I’ve got all these plot and character seedlings … now I’ve just got to write.

I’ll be blogging light — if at all — during November, though I do have two interviews with outstanding people coming up — and I’m about to die to tell you who I’m interviewing for December Book Buzz — let’s just say she’s a pretty famous novelist, and I can’t believe I get to ask her questions. I love my day job!

Well, I wish you a happy pre-Halloween weekend — if you’re a parent, I’m sure you’ve got parties and carnivals out the wazoo. But if you’re jumping into NaNoWriMo next week, I’d love to know there are at least two of us out there who have decided we’d rather write than lose our mind!