This is the most complicated review I’ve ever written.

I definitely felt like I missed a few things on first reading, and yet it all still… well, I don’t want to say it made sense, because it didn’t. But I definitely feel like it’s one of those images where the longer you stare at it, the more you see – the more you read this, the more little things you notice.

The stories are all so short, but so silly and… well, definitely a good representation of the madness that NaNoWriMo can be. I think I’m going to have to give this one a second readthrough (or perhaps even three or four or more) because one really wasn’t enough. Which is pretty much NaNoWriMo in a nutshell, I think, so that’s kinda perfect in its own way. This was… Well, simultaneously exactly what I was expecting it to be, and not at all what I was expecting. The NaNoLand Chronicles: Bedtime Stories for Wrimos will warm your heart, inspire your noveling, and reaffirm the greatest lesson of all: In writing, as in life, you can sometimes have too many muskrats, but you can never have too much fun. Illustrated by Lindy Groening, this collection contains all six tales, spread out over 60 wee pages of irresistible booklet-ness. That impenetrability-coupled with Chris' tendency to re-route each Chronicle so that it might contain a maximum number of muskrats-made the tales somewhat less effective than they might have been.įirmly believing that the tales could have a great impact if they made sense, Chris completely rewrote all of them in 2007, and penned two new ones, 'The Ocean-Swimming Instructors,' and 'The Hut-Building Contest of Monocle.' Unfortunately, Chris was so frightened of beating his readers over the head with the moral of each story that he often buried those morals so deeply that even he had trouble finding them. Or that was the way it was supposed to work. Through their investigations, Iddeus and Kevin learned something about human nature, and the reader was sneakily offered another reason why writing a novel in a month was not nearly the horrible idea it seemed on the surface. Set in a Medieval realm called NaNoLand, the stories followed a feudal lord (and self-taught anthropologist) named Iddeus and his none-too-bright servant, Kevin.Įach week, the duo would explore a new mystery in the realm. An autographed collection of six fables by NaNoWriMo founder Chris Baty, designed to warm the heart, embolden the noveling soul, and radically transform the general public's understanding of muskrats, sprout farmers, and the dangers of tea-oversteeping.īack in 2004, Chris decided to supplement the November pep talks he emailed to participants with some fables which would illustrate the counterintuitive joys of high-speed noveling.

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