published books from nanowrimo

14 NaNoWriMo Books That Have Been Published

By stacy conradt | nov 5, 2015.

While November means turkey, football and marathon shopping for some, it’s a month of being hunched over at a laptop slurping cup after cup of caffeine for others.

Yep—it’s National Novel Writing Month, or NaNoWriMo. People who are crazy ambitious enough to accept the challenge aim to write 50,000 words in November, which is about 1667 words every day. While no one expects masterpieces in such a short time span—the goal is to force writers to get some words down on paper without overthinking it—sometimes it happens. Sara Gruen’s Water for Elephants is a particularly successful example. But she’s not the only author to see buckling down and hammering out 50,000 words in a month pay off. Here are 14 other NaNo books that can be found on the shelves at a bookstore near you.

1. The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern

She wrote it during two NaNos, but we’re not holding it against her. The Night Circus spent seven weeks on the New York Times bestseller list and won an Alex Award from the American Library Association in 2012.

2. The Beautiful Land by Alan Averill

From Amazon: “ The Beautiful Land is part science fiction, part horror—and, at its core, a love story between a brilliant young computer genius and the fragile woman he has loved since high school. Now, he must bend time and space to save her life as the world around them descends into apocalyptic madness.”

3. Wool by Hugh Howey

From Barnes and Noble: “In a ruined and toxic landscape, a community exists in a giant silo underground, hundreds of stories deep. There, men and women live in a society full of regulations they believe are meant to protect them. Sheriff Holston, who has unwaveringly upheld the silo’s rules for years, unexpectedly breaks the greatest taboo of all: He asks to go outside.” Ridley Scott has expressed interest in directing the Wool movie, the rights to which have been purchased by 20th Century Fox.

4. The Forest of Hands and Teeth by Carrie Ryan

Another NYT bestseller, The Forest of Hands and Teeth is a young adult novel that takes place in a post-apocalyptic United States that is overrun with zombies. This is the first of a trilogy, and the film rights have been optioned by Seven Star Pictures.

5. Don’t Let Me Go by J.H. Trimble

From Publisher’s Weekly : "Nate and Adam are smalltown adolescents whose relationship is threatened when Adam moves to New York. Nate recalls the first moments of their romance and its development even as it’s threatened by the arrival of Luke, a closeted younger teen who’s attracted to Nate. Told frankly and honestly from Nate’s point of view, the novel explores issues like coming out, parental acceptance (and its lack), antigay violence, and the attitudes of faculty and fellow students, whose ranks provide both antagonists and allies. Layered with the gritty everyday details of teen existence, the book provides a convincingly clear window into the many perils and sometimes scant pleasures of life in high school while never feeling overly grim; it will be appreciated by adults and teens alike.”

6. Fangirl by Rainbow Rowell

The New York Times Book Review says that Rowell “specializes in young misfits charting their way in the world,” which must certainly be true in this young adult book about a fan fiction writer named Cath who is going away to college and is stunned when her twin sister refuses to be her roommate.

7. Persistence of Memory by Amelia Atwater-Rhodes

Published a couple years ago, this YA effort is about a teen who suffers from an alter ego. That alter ego might actually be a vampire who is thousands of years old.

8. Take the Reins by Jessica Burkhart

This was actually the first book in what has become a very successful pre-teen series for Burkhart. The Canterwood Crest novels began with a draft of Take the Reins in 2006’s NaNo.

9. Livvie Owen Lived Here by Sarah Dooley 

A story from the point of view of an autistic 14-year-old.

10. Losing Faith by Denise Jaden

When her sister (Faith, of course) dies from injuries sustained in a fall off a cliff, a girl named Brie finds that a religious cult may have been behind Faith's death.

11. The Compound by Stephanie Stuve-Bodeen

A tale of a family locked away in an underground bunker, The Compound received a 2009 Bank Street Award for Best Children’s Book of the Year.

12. The Hungry Season by T. Greenwood

From Publisher’s Weekly : “Renowned novelist Sam Mason cannot conjure the words that used to come so easily to him before the death of his daughter: 'the words are too thin, as fragile and brittle as bones.' Sam can no longer connect, especially not with his wife, Mena, and begins to waste away. Hunger proves to be a powerful metaphor for the family’s loss and desires although means of emotional escape are predictable.”

13. Olivia Bean, Trivia Queen by Donna Gephart

Olivia Bean heads to Hollywood to be on Jeopardy! Sounds like our kind of girl.

14. The God Patent by Ransom Stephens

When a war erupts over two patents created by a pair of electrical engineers, they find themselves in the middle of a battle of science vs. religion.

This is an updated version of a post that originally appeared in 2012.

8 bestselling books written during NaNoWriMo

By: Jill Grunenwald, Marketing and Communications Specialist

It’s November, which means it’s National Novel Writing Month ! For the next 30 days, writers all over the world will be sitting down at their computer or notebook with the intention to write 50,000 words. That’s an average of 1,667 words a day, every day, for an entire month.

Many try, but not all succeed (I can count myself among that group, although this year I am determined to reach that 50,000 word goal!). Libraries often prove to be a wonderful resource for the local writers in their community during this time. Along with just simply providing quiet space, many libraries also host write-ins where writers gather for a few hours and crank out as many words as they can.

But another way libraries can encourage writers is by showcasing the potential that can come out of a NaNoWriMo story. Several well-established authors used NaNoWriMo to jump-start their books and continue to participate every year with new books. Here are eight bestselling books that started as NaNoWriMo projects:

The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern Morgenstern’s debut novel is often touted as the biggest title to come out of NaNoWriMo, and for good reason. The Night Circus , featuring two star-crossed magicians, was an immediate bestseller and written over the course of three NaNoWriMos. For fans who have been clamoring for more Morgenstern, the long wait is soon over: Her second novel, The Starless Sea , is set to be published Nov. 5.

A Blade So Black by L.L. McKinney A contemporary retelling of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland involving a Black teenage protagronist who has been tasked with battling monstrous creatures? Sign me up.

Cinder by Marissa Meyer So you could write one novel over the course of three Novembers or you could be like Meyer and write three novels in a single November. Yes, you read that correctly. 150,011 words in a single month . I’m also not entirely sure how she did it either, but here we are. Her Lunar Chronicles series is a retelling of classic fairy tales with a sci-fi twist, like the cyborg Cinderella in the first book of the series.

Fangirl by Rainbow Rowell My personal favorite from this list, Fangirl was practically written for 18-year-old me who studied creative writing in college, wrote a lot of fan-fiction and was (well, is) obsessed with Harry Potter. Rowell loved her book-within-a-book of Fangirl so much she wrote two companion novels, Carry On and Wayward Son, that focus on the fictional Simon Snow.

Wool by Hugh Howey Wool started as a short story that Howey self-published, but after noticing its rising popularity among readers, he decided to use NaNoWriMo as an opportunity to flesh out the story and turn it into a larger piece of fiction.

Side Effects May Vary by Julie Murphy Before Dumplin ’ , there was Side Effects May Vary . Murphy’s debut is about Alice, a 16-year-old who is diagnosed with cancer. She asks her best friend to help her with a bucket list that’s just as much about revenge as it is about hope. But just as her scores are settled, she goes into remission and now has to face the consequences of all she’s said and done.

The Astonishing Color of After by Emily X.R. Pan Alternating between real and magic, past and present, friendship and romance, hope and despair, this is a stunning and heartbreaking novel about finding oneself through family history, art, grief, and love.

Water for Elephants by Sarah Gruen I started working at a Barnes & Noble shortly after this book came out and it was everywhere . It was on bestseller lists for a year and was turned into a major Hollywood movie, so it’s kind of amazing to think that it started as NaNoWriMo project.

These titles and more published NaNoWriMo books are available for purchase in Marketplace . After buying, consider turning them into a curated collection on your OverDrive website and inspire readers and writers all month long. And visit our Libby Life blog to discover more books written during NaNoWriMo!

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National Novel Writing Month SO Overview: Published Books from NaNoWriMo

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Published Books Started During NaNoWriMo

Need some more inspiration?  See the following list of successfully published books, which are all the result of hard work by the author during NaNoWriMo!

• Published Wrimos

Click the link below to see NaNoWriMo's official list of "published wrimos," or published novels that were first drafted during NaNoWriMo.

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9 Amazing Books That Came Out of NaNoWriMo

This annual writing competition has spawned some incredible novels. 

National Novel Writing Month, or NaNoWriMo, was started in 1999 by Chris Baty. The purpose of the project is to write a fictional novel over the course of November. The overall goal given is to write 50,000 words (an average of 1,667 words a day). The word count was based off of the shortest book that could be found on Baty’s shelf at the time— Alduous Huxley’s Brave New World .  

The first year Baty organized NaNoWriMo, 21 people participated, and six people completed their novels. The second year, 140 people participated . Those numbers have only continued to grow, and now, hundreds of thousands of people participate in NaNoWriMo every year. Writers who complete the NaNoWriMo word count can upload their novels to the NaNoWriMo site, and have their word counts verified t o show that they’ve "won."

Related: 15 Inspiring Quotes About Writing to Help You During NaNoWriMo

For some writers, however, their success goes be yond the banners and certificates that NaNoWriMo offers for completing the challenge. We've rounded up nine of the best novels that have been published after their completion during NaNoWriMo.

With the Fire on High

By Elizabeth Acevedo

At 17 years old, Emoni Santiago is an incredible cook and dreams of becoming a chef. However, her current circumstances have made those dreams seem, at times, unattainable. Raised by her abuela, Emoni has been forced to make difficult decisions since she got pregnant during her freshman year of high school.  Emoni is determined to make a better life for her family, and when she gains the chance to go on a cooking apprenticeship in Spain, she sees a chance to make her dreams a reality. 

Related: 10 Foodie Books Featuring Strong Women

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The Night Circus

By Erin Morgenstern

Published in 2011, author Erin Morgenstern actually spent three NaNoWriMo competitions working on this bestselling novel, and has since offered a pep talk to current participants .

Celia and Marco are magicians who work for Le Cirque des Rêves, a mysterious circus that only operates at night. This atmospheric and fantastical novel takes place over the course of several years, and follows Celia and Marco as they grow up, become competent in their respective crafts—and find themselves questioning their place in the circus. 

By Rainbow Rowell

Cath and her twin sister, Wren, grew up with a love for the Simon Snow books. However, as they go into college, Wren has grown out of her obsession, and Cath is still hanging on. It leads to a divide between the otherwise tight knit twins. Cath finds herself rooming with someone other than Wren, and is surrounded by people that either don’t understand her interest in Simon Snow fanfiction, or who find it banal.  It’s up to Cath to find her way in this new and unfriendly environment. Whether or not she does that with Simon Snow as a facet of her identity—well, that’s her decision. 

By Hugh Howey

This dystopian novel f inds mankind in a desperate struggle to survive. The Earth’s surface is no longer habitable. The humans that remain all live underground, in one silo. Dissenters begin to spread adverse opinions—but when they start to tell others that the Earth’s surface may be habitable again, they’re punished, and sent to their death.  They’re allowed outside. 

Water for Elephants

By Sara Gruen

This 2006 book is probably the novel most famous for being written during NaNoWriMo. Set in the early 20th century, Jacob Jankowski is in the final days of his exams at Cornell University. He’s nearly completed his doctorate in veterinary medicine when he receives the news that his parents have been killed. This tragedy changes the course of Jacob’s life forever. He leaves Cornell, hops a train, and winds up joining the circus—the Benzini Brothers Circus, in fact.  Jacob finds himself working as a vet for the circus, and becomes swept up with the vagabond life—and fascinated by Marlena, the wife of the animal trainer. The film was made into a movie in 2011, starring Robert Pattinson, Reese Witherspoon, and Christoph Waltz. 

By Marissa Meyer

This retelling of Cinderella will give you a new appreciation for the beloved fairytale. Cinder is a cyborg, and considered a second-class citizen in New Beijing. Set after World War 4 (we have that to look forward to), the planet is populated by humans and androids alike. Cinder is a diligent and talented mechanic, but she faces adversity—primarily in the form of her vile stepmother.

Many humans are subjected to a mysterious pandemic called letumosis. When it kills the Emperor, he leaves his son, Kai, in charge. Cinder’s life isn’t perfect, but it’s calm—until it becomes intertwined with Prince Kai’s. 

Don’t Let Me Go

By J.H. Trumble

Nate and Adam have faced a lot since getting together—they’ve come out to their friends, they’ve told their parents about one another, they’ve faced homophobia and hatred from small-minded people. Through all of it, the two have stuck it out together, and have stayed strong.  But when Adam takes a job in New York, the long-distance relationship places the two under strain for the first time since they got together. Luke finds himself questioning Adam’s commitment—and his own. 

Related: The Ultimate List of LGBTQ Books for Teens

Modern Girls

By Jennifer S. Brown

Modern Girls follows two Jewish women, a mother and a daughter, in New York in 1935. Rose is a Russian immigrant, a mother of five, and a housewife. She recognizes her daughter Dottie’s talents for bookkeeping, and encourages her to pursue her career. Dottie is more focused on settling down, as many nineteen year old girls in her position are. When both Dottie and Rose find themselves pregnant, they each face questions around their social mores and faiths.  Related: The Best Young Adult Books for Adult Readers

The Wedding Date

By Jasmine Guillory

This was one of the best selling romance novels of 2018, and we bet you had no idea it was written during NaNoWriMo! Most people browse Tinder or Hinge for a last-minute plus one to a wedding. Drew Nichols found his when they became stranded in an elevator together. Drew dreads being a groomsman in a wedding for his friend and ex-girlfriend. He can’t show up alone—which is where fellow temporary-elevator resident Alexa Monroe comes in. 

Alexa finds herself taking a chance on this handsome, funny stranger, and agrees to be his fake date. When the wedding comes to an end, Alexa and Drew part ways...but each finds that they can’t get the other out of their heads. 

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7 Books That Started As NaNoWriMo Novels

It's NaNoWriMo season, and we're hoping to motivate current writers with these success stories!

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November is upon us, which means one thing if you are a writer: National Novel Writing Month , also know as NaNoWriMo, the 30-day period in which writers collectively take it upon themselves to write 50,000 words of a novel.

Have you joined the Den of Geek Book Club? You should!

Many have tried, not all have succeeded, but a very lucky few have turned their NaNoWriMo projects into successful, published novels. As NaNoWriMo begins, we’re taking the time to highlight its success stories in the hopes of motivating all of thos brave NaNoWriMo souls who are embarking on the perilous, exciting journey this year.

Here are seven books that began life as NaNoWriMo projects…

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The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern

Written over the span of three NaNoWriMo periods, The Night Circus is the story of two dueling magicians and the young people who get pulled into their epic struggle for dominance. Those two magicians are called Prospero the Enchanter, aka Hector Bowen and “the man in the grey suit,” aka Mr. A. H—, and those young people are Bowen’s six-year-old daughter Celia and a nine-year-old orphan called Marco Alisdair.

Further reading: Best New Fantasy Books

This generations-long duel plays out in the eponymous Night Circus, or Le Cirque des Rêves, where the now-adult Celia and Marco work to out-magic the other and fall in love during the process, not fully understanding the rules of the competition of which they are a part.

The Night Circus was released in 2011 and spent seven weeks on the New York Times Best Seller list.

Read The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern

Cinder by Marissa Meyer

The first book in The Lunar Chronicles series, Cinder is a reimagining of the Cinderella story set in the futuristic city of New Beijing and following Linh Cinder, a cyborg and mechanic.

Further reading: Best New Science Fiction Books

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The speculative fiction bend on the fairy tale classic would go on to launch a full series, featuring different fairy tale characters reimagined in clever ways. Scarlet is based on Little Red Riding Hood. Cress is based on Rapuzel. And Winter is based on Snow White.

Cinder , Scarlet ,   Cress , Fairest (Book 3.5 in the series),   and  Heartless  (a standalone novel based on Alice in Wonderland ) were all written during NaNoWriMo.

Read Cinder by Marissa Meyer

The Beautiful Land by Alan Averill

Alan Averill began writing his debut novel The Beautiful Land during NaNoWriMo before going on to publish it through Ace Books (a Penguin Random House specialty publisher).

Further reading: Best New Horror Books

The book follows Takahiro O’Leary, a man who explores parallel timelines for the Axon Corporation. When he retrieves information that would mean Axon changing the chronology of  his  timeline in order to maximize profits, Tak must use his knowledge and power to save his timeline and the woman he loves… and, you know, prevent the apocalypse.

Read The Beautiful Land by Alan Averill

The Forest of Hands and Teeth by Carrie Ryan

Started during NaNoWriMo 2006 , this 2010 novel by Carrie Ryan follows Mary, a young woman living in a world that has been overrun by zombies. In Mary’s post-apocalyptic reality, her dwindling village considers itself the last of humanity. Surrounded by a chain link fence and ruled by a group of dubious nuns known as The Sisterhood, Mary questions the future her rigid society has laid out for her. Also, there is a love triangle.

Read The Forest of Hands and Teeth by Carrie Ryan

Fangirl by Rainbow Rowell

While many authors write their debut novel with NaNoWriMo as a support, Rainbow Rowell had already written and successfully sold two books when she gave the writing challenge a try . The result? The glorious Fangirl , the story of Cath, a college-aged girl who must balance her new college life and the demands of her fanfiction-writing in this coming-of-age romance.

Further reading: Best New Young Adult Fiction

Fangirl is the NaNoWriMo gift that keeps on giving, as Rowell would go on to write Carry On , a story set in the world of the fanfiction Cath is writing in Fangirl . The novel about queer wizards is getting a sequel in 2020 .

Read Fangirl by Rainbow Rowell

Water for Elephants by Sara Gruen

This one has a novel and a feature film adaptation! And to think… it all began during NaNoWriMo.

Water for Elephants by Sara Gruen is about Jacob Janowski, an orphan and veterinary student whose life becomes intertwined with the Benzini Brothers Most Spectacular Show on Earth. Put in charge of caring for the circus animals, Jacob meets Marlena, an equestrian star married to the circus’ brutal animal trainer, and Rosie, an elephant who could spell salvation for the down-on-its-luck circus.

Water for Elephants sold a bajillion copies and is now a movie starring Reese Witherspoon and Robert Pattinson, so that is pretty impressive.

Read Water for Elephants by Sara Gruen

Latest Book reviews

Ripley review: new adaptation is dark and stormy and not always in a good way, interview with the vampire episode 1 review: in throes of increasing wonder, interview with the vampire review: the best anne rice adaptation ever made, wool by hugh howey.

According to author Hugh Howey , 80,000 of the 160,000 total words of The Wool Omnibus were written during NaNoWriMo. The originally self-published work has appeared on the New York Times Best Sellers list, been translated into 19 foreign languages, and won IndieReader’s Best Indie Book of 2012 Award.

It also has a great premise: Set in a silo deep underground, a community’s sheriff asks to go outside, setting into motion a series of event that will change the life of this society forever.

Read Wool by Hugh Howey

Have you ever done NaNoWriMo? Have you wanted to? Let us know in the comments below!

Kayti Burt is a staff editor covering books, TV, movies, and fan culture at Den of Geek . Read more of her work here or follow her on Twitter @kaytiburt .

Read and download the Den of Geek NYCC 2018 Special Edition Magazine right here!

Kayti Burt | @kaytiburt

Kayti is a pop culture writer, editor, and full-time nerd who comes from a working class background. A member of the Television Critics Association, she specializes…

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What Is NaNoWriMo?: Your Guide to Joining in 2023

POSTED ON Oct 26, 2023

Written by Hannah Lee Kidder

With November rolling around again, NaNoWriMo writers are gearing up for another year. But what is NaNoWriMo? And should you be joining it?

In 2021, 427,653 writers participated in NaNoWriMo programs. 406 bookstores, libraries, and community centers hosted Come Write In sessions. It’s kind of a big deal! So what does NaNoWriMo stand for?

In this blog, we'll cover everything you need to know about what NaNoWriMo is and how to join in on the fun.

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This blog on NaNoWriMo will cover:

What is nanowrimo.

What is NaNoWriMo? It's an acronym! And what does NaNoWriMo stand for?

National Novel Writing Month.

For the month of November, hundreds of thousands of writers pull together annually with the goal of writing 50,000 words for their novels.

The idea is to churn out all, or most, of a first draft to revise later. Often, the hardest part of writing a book is getting the first draft down. NaNoWriMo’s goal is to help writers bite the bullet and get that over with so they can turn it into a proper book later on.

Water for Elephants by Sarah Gruen, Fangirl by Rainbow Rowell, and The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern all started out as NaNoWriMo novels.

Marissa Meyer even drafted the first three books of The Lunar Chronicles ( Cinder, Scarlet, and Cress ) in a SINGLE NaNoWriMo.

NaNoWriMO is what authors use as an excuse to dedicate concentrated effort and time to whipping out their first drafts, while having fun with fellow writers! There are so many NaNoWriMo young writers who get their start during November – and you could too!

When is NaNoWriMo?

Every year since 1999, NaNoWriMo has kicked off on November 1st.

But there’s fun to be had beforehand! You can join for Preptober!

What is Preptober?

During the month of October, many writers prepare for a successful NaNoWriMo. So, now that you know what NaNoWriMo is, let's discuss what you should do to set up for it.

How to prepare for NaNoWriMo

Outside of the standard 50,000 word goal, you might set other goals, like writing your first novel, rewriting an old draft, trying out a new genre, etc. Preptober is a good time to sort out your intentions for the month. Here are some of the things you can do to succeed during NaNoWriMo prep .

Make a writing schedule

Determining which days and times are best for your writing sessions can help you hold yourself accountable and stay on track! You can use NaNoWriMo’s site for word tracking, but you might try a third-party program (or a physical notebook or planner ) to schedule and plan your sessions.

NovelPad’s goal-tracking page.

For example, NovelPad has an intuitive goals page that lets you set heavier and lighter writing days, vacations, sprints, and—my favorite—the option to adapt the schedule to your progress. That means you don’t have to do the math if you’ve over- or undershot your word goal for the day, because NovelPad calculates that for you.

Announce that you’re playing

If you have a new author platform, participating in NaNoWriMo is what helps you to meet other writers and readers! It can also fill up your content queue for the whole month (and the month before, if you’re participating in Preptober).

NaNoWriMo young writers can utilize hashtags to get new eyes on their accounts. Here are a few you can try:

• #NaNoWriMo (insert year)
• #Preptober (insert year)
• #AuthorsOfInstagram (or #AuthorsOfTwitter)
• #WritersOfInstagram / Twitter
• #WritersCorner
• #WritingCommunity
• #WritersCommunity

You can also scroll through those hashtags to find other people’s posts to make friends and show support for their projects. NaNoWriMo is meant to be social, so get social!

Learn all the NaNoWriMo rules

Luckily, NaNoWriMo rules are pretty straightforward.

• Writing starts at 12:00 a.m. on November 1st and ends 11:59:59 p.m. on November 30th, local time. You cannot start early.
• Your novel must reach a minimum of 50,000 words before the end of November to win. It doesn't matter if the novel is complete – just that you've hit the word count!
• You cannot include any content written before the November 1st start date, but you are allowed to plan and take notes in advance.
• You can write any book genres !

Outline or plan

Some NaNoWriters are steadfastly against outlining or planning of any sort leading up to November. Many say it feels like cheating! If you’re in this camp of thinking, there is nothing wrong with that. Have a pure and wholesome time writing your book solely from square one and seeing what happens. That was my personal favorite way to do NaNoWriMo before I was a professional author, because the discovery of the story is most of the fun.

Other writers like to outline the entire book before they even start. If outlining isn’t for you, skip it. Otherwise, Preptober is the perfect time to get your story planned out so you can start strong!

You might make a brief beat sheet to know the general direction you’d like the story to go in, or you might go in depth, scene-by-scene, to develop your story and know exactly how you want it to go.

Every writer is different, so follow your gut and do what you think sounds the most fun for you! After all, half of what NaNoWriMo is for is to have fun with your writing.

Build character sheets

This is another optional step that not all writers like to do. Building character sheets is a good option for writers who like to prepare (but not cheat!). It doesn’t add to your manuscript word count, so you can do this work ahead of time without breaking any NaNoWriMo rules.

Like an outline, your character sheets can be as detailed or simple as you prefer. Character sheets can range from a basic overview of the character arc, to a multi-page rundown of everything about them. I’ve known writers who include a character’s second favorite meal and their childhood email address.

Different strokes for different folks—do what sounds fun!

Make mood boards and playlists

If you want to plan for the vibes and atmosphere of your project more than the actual plot and characters, you might like making mood boards and playlists. This can get you in the headspace for the book you want to write without actually planning anything out.

Canva , Pinterest , and Pexels are all great sites to get you started making aesthetics and mood boards for your story, characters, or world-building.

You can use YouTube, Spotify, or your favorite music platform to make playlists. Some writers like ambient music (fantasy tavern playlists, for example), while others like to control the mood of their story by playing certain songs while they’re writing certain scenes.

Set up a reward system or accountability partners

What is NaNoWriMo's purpose? To get you to write 50,000 words. How do you get there? Rewards and partners!

Solo writers benefit from reward systems. Every day you meet your word count goal, you might have a treat planned. Going on a walk, having a snack, dropping a dollar in a fund for a bigger prize by the end of the month are all great ideas.

Social writers benefit from accountability partners, writing buddies or groups, or anything else that lets them interact with other writers who are working toward the same goal. Try joining forums on NaNoWriMo.org , finding Facebook groups for NaNoWriMo young writers, or scrolling hashtags on Twitter and Instagram to find others who are participating.

NaNoWriMo.org also lets you find local writing events . Most towns will have a library or school hosting write-ins and other fun stuff, so be sure to check for events near you so you can make the most of what NaNoWriMo is for the writing community.

Who is NaNoWriMo for?

Anyone can join NaNoWriMo. NaNoWriMo is what novelists who are looking to do something fun sign up for. It also gives writers extra motivation to start (or finish) their book, or make friends in the writer sphere.

Why should you do NaNoWriMo?

There are lots of great reasons to participate in NaNoWriMo this year!

For one thing, the friends you’ll make are wonderful. NaNoWriMo is what helps writers to network and hang out with other writers in their genre. If you participate, be sure to check out some of the NaNoWriMo writers pages and discussion boards .

Another benefit is the extra motivation . When else would you sit down to slap out 50,000 words in one month? I’m sure there are some rockstar writers among us, but for us normies—that’s a huge goal! You could get a big head start—or even finish—your novel! In one month! That's what NaNoWriMo is all about.

Did you know several companies sponsor NaNoWriMo and offer special deals and discounts to participants? Some of these sponsorship deals are so sweet that it’s worth participating in NaNoWriMo just to grab some!

Here are just a few NaNoWriMo corporate sponsors and their freebie offers:

• NovelPad (free to use for all of November, 20% off for all writers, 40% off for NaNoWriMo winners)
• IngramSpark (upload your book for free)
• Plottr (15% off for participants, 30% off for winners)
• ProWritingAid (40% off one year for all participants, 50% off for winners)
• Dabble (20% off for all participants, 50% off for winners)
• WorldAnvil (40% off for all participants)

Check out the other NaNoWriMo offers for this year!

How to participate in NaNoWriMo

So you know what NaNoWriMo is and how to prepare…but how do you get involved? Here is how to join in on the action:

1. Make an account

If it’s your first year, create your account on NaNoWriMo’s site. You can fill out an author profile, create a project, see your writing badges, add buddies, find local NaNoWriMo writing events, join online groups, and more after you make an account.

Drop in a profile picture and a little personality, especially if NaNoWriMo is what you're using to make more writing friends.

2. Prep your project

You can set up the book you’ll be working on for your own reference and motivation, and so other writers in your genre can find you.

Writers can add their novel’s name, project status, genres, summaries, excerpts, playlists, and even a cover (or mockup cover) for their book.

(Making mockup covers is a ton of fun—try Canva or BookBrush for templates.)

3. Make friends

Use your buddy list to add writer friends you already have who are participating in NaNoWriMo, as well as new friends you find through the writing challenge. One of the biggest benefits for participants is meeting new writers and sharing accountability and excitement for your projects.

After you add them to your buddy list, try to keep in touch throughout the month. You could follow each other on socials as well. You never know where your next favorite writing or critique partner will come from!

4. Write some words

As you work toward your goal throughout the month, don’t forget to update your word count. This helps with accountability, plus you can earn cute profile badges for hitting different milestones.

5. Follow these tips for nailing NaNoWriMo

There are so many NaNoWriMo tips out there that can help you succeed during and after the event. Make sure to:

• Set realistic daily writing goals
• Commit to NOT editing anything until November is over
• Get a solid support group and other treats to motivate you
• Tell friends and family to leave you alone while you write (Make sure they understand what NaNoWriMo is!)
• Turn off phone notifications
• Use distraction-free writing apps

6. When it’s all over, revise

The step that turns a NaNoWriMo project into a book is what comes when November is over—namely, revisions. After all, what NaNoWriMo is about is writing, not editing. Editing comes after!

It’s usually a good idea to take a break after your first draft. Take a step back and let it breathe before you jump into revisions. This might be a couple days or a couple of weeks, but set a time to come back to your novel. If you don’t make a specific plan, it’s easy to forget about those 50,000 words until NaNoWriMo rolls around again.

The revision process looks different for every writer, but the first step is a read-through (after your break). Many people call this a self-edit.

Make a list of macro (big, structural) changes to make to your story in your next draft.

The first draft is typically the easiest, so prepare and pace yourself for your revision journey, and good luck!

NaNoWriMo is a ton of fun, super motivational, and a great opportunity to make some friends while you get your words in. There’s a reason hundreds of thousands of writers participate in the event every year!

Now you understand exactly what NaNoWriMo is and how to participate, so are you doing NaNoWriMo this year? Will you plan it out, or are you flying by the seat of your pants this time? Let us know in the comments!

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Emily Martin

Emily has a PhD in English from the University of Southern Mississippi, MS, and she has an MFA in Creative Writing from GCSU in Milledgeville, GA, home of Flannery O’Connor. She spends her free time reading, watching horror movies and musicals, cuddling cats, Instagramming pictures of cats, and blogging/podcasting about books with the ladies over at #BookSquadGoals (www.booksquadgoals.com). She can be reached at [email protected].

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This trove of unforgettable short stories and accompanying essays on craft offers an ode to YA literature. Ranging from contemporary romance to fantasy, these stories showcase underrepresented voices of YA fiction. Each piece is selected and introduced by a YA all-star like Jason Reynolds and Sabaa Tahir. What makes these memorable stories tick? How do authors build a world or refine a voice or weave in that deliciously creepy atmosphere? Emily X. R. Pan and Nova Ren Suma address these questions and more in essays and discussions on craft so aspiring writers can write their own short stories.

I know it’s hard to believe, but November 1 is already right around the corner. I know. Where did the year go? How did we get here? Unfortunately, I don’t have time to answer those questions or even reflect on them. Why? Because it’s time to get ready for what can be the most rewarding and the most stressful time of the year for every writer. That’s right. NaNoWriMo is here again.

It’s time to get writing. It’s time to get inspired. And if you’re wondering how to get your mind in the right space to do all of that, try these books to help prep you for NaNoWriMo.

The 3 A.M. Epiphany: Uncommon Writing Exercises that Transform Your Fiction by Brian Kiteley

The first thing you have to do before you can get to writing your next great novel? You have to be inspired. If you’re struggling for an idea or you’re just feeling stuck getting words across the page, Brian Kiteley’s inspired writing prompts in The 3 A.M. Epiphany will help you get through any writer’s block.

Ready, Set, Novel! by Lindsey Grant and Tavia Stewart-Streit

Got your idea ready to go? Great. It’s time to organize. Lindsey Grant and Tavia Stewart-Streit’s Ready, Set, Novel! is the perfect workbook with prompts to help you develop characters, scenes, and outlines for your great NaNoWriMo novel. This workbook really thinks of literally every step of the novel-planning process and guides you through it.

Story Genius by Lisa Cron

You’ve got your outline. Great. How do you turn that outline into a riveting novel that people will actually read and, you know, enjoy? Lisa Cron is here to help with that! This book looks at how the brain responds to fiction. Cron uses cognitive storytelling strategies and develops a step-by-step guide to making a blueprint for a successful story that actually goes somewhere interesting.

What I Talk About When I Talk About Running by Haruki Murakami

After you’ve got your tools together to write your own NaNoWriMo novel, the next thing you need for a bit of inspiration is some advice from successful novelists. Haruki Murakami’s memoir What I Talk About When I Talk About Running is the author’s look at his life as a marathon runner and a writer. Murakami makes many parallels between the discipline it takes to run a marathon and the discipline it takes to write. And what better analogy could there be for the NaNoWriMo writing process? This book will inspire you to start your own writing marathon, if not your own running marathon.

The Little Book of Muses by Khaled Talib

Looking for inspiration that’s a little more abstract? Try Khaled Talib’s The Little Book of Muses. This book is full of phrases, reflections, and expressions that will make you fall in love with the written word all over again. Hopefully some of the beautiful words written in this book will spark some beautiful words of your own in your NaNoWriMo project.

Black Ink: Literary Legends on the Peril, Power, and Pleasure of Reading and Writing by Stephanie Stokes Oliver

When you’re in the middle of your NaNoWriMo project and you’re feeling discouraged, remind yourself that writing is powerful. No really. Reading and writing can give people the power to change the world. Don’t believe me? Then check out Black Ink . This book looks at over 250 years of Black literature, from Frederick Douglass to Ta-Nehisi Coates. In this collection, African American authors look at the way Black people have been historically disenfranchised through a lack of access to reading and writing, and how literature can be an act of resistance.

Pen on Fire: A Busy Woman’s Guide to Igniting the Writer Within by Barbara DeMarco-Barrett

Okay, so you understand that writing is important. You know that you want to write something meaningful. The next hurdle: finding time to do it. Barbara DeMarco-Barrett understands that a lot of writers (especially women) never get around to writing because they feel like they don’t have the time. This book aims to help you find the time. Even if it’s just 15 minutes a day. Or when you’re waiting in line. Or stalled in traffic. There are minutes throughout the day you can use to write, and this book will help you find them.

Self-Editing for Fiction Writers by Renni Browne and Dave King

After you’ve finished NaNoWriMo November, the work isn’t over. Surely you didn’t think those published NaNoWriMo novels when straight from NaNoWriMo to the press. A first draft is always going to need lots of edits, especially when you’re writing so fast and furiously throughout the short month of November. Renni Browne and Dave King can help you get from your messy first draft to a publishable novel.

Need more books to inspire you and get you through NaNoWriMo this year? Check out these 9 Books You Didn’t Know Started As NaNoWriMos . If they can do it, you can too! Good luck!

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Canadian authors remember the late Alice Munro — and the literary legacy she leaves behind

Heather o'neill, kevin chong, andrew pyper among the authors who admired the canlit legend.

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Alice Munro, a Canadian author who was revered worldwide as master of the short story and who won the Nobel Prize for Literature,  died on May 13, 2024 at the age of 92.  The prolific author leaves behind a strong literary legacy — along with many Canadian authors who were inspired by her and her work.

Below are some comments collected by CBC Books from just a few Canadian authors who shared their thoughts on the passing of Alice Munro.

Heather O'Neill

Heather O'Neill is novelist, short story writer and essayist based in Montreal. Her debut novel Lullabies for Little Criminals won Canada Reads 2007 and was a Giller Prize finalist. She was the first back-to-back finalist for the Scotiabank Giller Prize for The Girl Who Was Saturday Night in 2014 and her short story collection Daydreams of Angels in 2015. 

Her novel The Lonely Hearts Hotel won the Paragraphe Hugh MacLennan Prize for Fiction and was longlisted for Canada Reads 2021. When We Lost Our Heads is her most recent novel. O'Neill championed The Future on Canada Reads 2024, becoming the first person to win as both a writer and a contender. 

"Alice Munro has affected me profoundly at so many different stages in life. Her characters come across to everyone around them as women who will follow the rules. And then they don't.

"They run away from those who try to fit them into the mould of what a woman should be. Munro always sees women as independent of their roles as mothers or daughters or wives.

Alice Munro has affected me profoundly at so many different stages in life. - Heather O'Neill

"They are wild creatures who pack their suitcases, button up their cardigans and sneak out of houses in the middle of the night to discover the world. And, oh they make a wonderful mess of it. But when Alice Munro shows us a woman making a decision to undo her life, these are truly incandescent and some of the most beautifully staged scenes in the history of literature."

Kevin Chong

Kevin Chong is a Vancouver-based writer and associate professor at the University of British Columbia Okanagan. His books include the nonfiction book Northern Dancer and fiction titles like The Plague and Beauty Plus Pity . His latest book, The Double Life of Benson Yu , was a finalist for the 2023 Scotiabank Giller Prize . Chong, along with Suzette Mayr and Ashley Audrain made up the jury for the 2024 CBC Short Story Prize .

• Kevin Chong wants you to write about what you're obsessed with

"I don't write short stories — not that many, at least — because of Alice Munro. Reading her work, I know that I am not good enough, not patient enough, not aware enough. I appreciate the greater margin of error in novel-writing.

I have no doubt her books will still be read and cherished for generations to come. - Kevin Chong

"But what I've taken from her fiction is how 'every short story is at least two stories,' the way events in a character's present-day situation can bring to surface a story from the past. I'm thinking of the satisfying ironies of The Bear Came Over the Mountain, where the main character, Grant, a philander in his past, sees his wife, who is suffering from dementia, fall in love with another man in a care home.

"I have no doubt her books will still be read and cherished for generations to come."

Carleigh Baker

Carleigh Baker is a writer and teacher of Cree, Métis and Icelandic heritage. Her debut short story collection,  Bad Endings  won the City of Vancouver Book Award and was a finalist for the Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction Prize and the Emerging Indigenous Voices Award . She previously taught creative writing at Simon Fraser University. Her latest book is the story collection  Last Woman , published in 2024.

"I'll never understand why the literati believes that novels are the pinnacle of sophisticated expression, but in spite of this, Alice Munro kept writing short stories.

I will miss her, but how lucky we are to have her voice! - Carleigh Baker

"And if that wasn't enough to make her a hero in my mind, they are gorgeous stories, understated at the surface but churning with emotion in their depths. She saw people and places so clearly. She gave us a body of work that entertains, teaches, and endures.

"My favourite collection is  Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage . I read those stories over and over to help me remember how to be a person in the world. I will miss her, but how lucky we are to have her voice!"

Andrew Pyper

Andrew Pyper is the Toronto author of novels including Lost Girls , which won the Arthur Ellis Award for best first novel in 2000, The Demonologist , The Only Child and The Homecoming . His forthcoming novel William , written under the pseudonym of Mason Coile will be released in fall 2024.

"I was born and raised in Alice Munro Country. That's not how the people in my hometown of Stratford, Ont., ever referred to it, but when I first encountered Munro's stories as a teenager, I saw instantly that she was inhabiting the same place where I grew up. By 'place' I don't mean the literal landscape of bean fields and unsidewalked towns and red brick Victorians and roads that petered out after a few dusty miles, but a location defined by things unseen as much as the observable.

When I first encountered Munro's stories as a teenager, I saw instantly that she was inhabiting the same place where I grew up. - Andrew Pyper

"Houses dark but for a single light from a second-floor bedroom, unattended children whispering together in weed-ridden yards, single men sitting on rooming house porches looking out at passersby with longing, or nostalgia, or menace. I recognized my town (and the ones on the cross-hatched roads around it) in reading Alice Munro more profoundly than in any photograph or history or map.

"As a young person entertaining his first daydreams of being a writer, I was astonished not only by how she conjured this magic, but the way she did it while standing on the same unremarkable ground I stood on."  

Deepa Rajagopalan

Ontario-based author Deepa Rajagopalan was the 2021 RBC/PEN Canada New Voices Award winner. Born to Indian parents in Saudi Arabia, she has lived across India, the US, and Canada. Her previous writing has appeared in publications such as the Bristol Short Story Prize Anthology , the New Quarterly, Room and Arc. Her debut story collection, Peacocks of Instagram , was published in 2024.

"I just heard about Alice Munro. It's the end of an era. I was recently a guest in the podcast, Bookspo by Kerry Clare, which is based on books that inspired your writing. I had picked an Alice Munro story, Corrie , as my inspiration for a story Rahel in my collection. I had mentioned that studying Alice Munro's work carefully is equivalent to getting an MFA degree. She's inspired me to think deeply about perspective, time and subversion in short stories.

It's the end of an era. - Deepa Rajagopalan

"It is hard to pick a favourite, but I think the story Dimensions from her collection Too Much Happiness is probably one of my favourites. The emotional devastation is so profound in this story because of the plainness of the telling. I remember listening to an interview where Munro talked about removing all the flowery language during the editing process. I try to think about this when I'm editing. How to keep the prose as plain and precise as possible so the reader does all the feeling."

Chanel M. Sutherland

Chanel M. Sutherland is a writer and product marketing director living in Montreal. She was born in St. Vincent and the Grenadines and moved to Canada when she was 10 years old. She holds a BA in English literature from Concordia University. She is currently working on a collection of interconnected short stories that explore the complex relationships and experiences of life in a small Caribbean village. 

Sutherland is a two-time  CBC Literary Prize  winner. She first  won the  2021 CBC Nonfiction Prize  for her essay,  Umbrella . Then in 2022, she  won the CBC Short Story Prize  for her story  Beneath the Softness of Snow . 

"Throughout all the ages of my life, I've found myself drawn to Alice Munro's storytelling. Like many writers of short stories, I've felt her influence deeply. The Moons of Jupiter is a story I return to time and again, highlighting Munro's lasting impact on my literary journey.

Her legacy remains an enduring testament to the power of storytelling. - Chanel M. Sutherland

"What initially captivated me was Munro's knack for illuminating the ordinary, infusing the mundane with layers of meaning and significance. Her narratives overflowed with empathy and nuance, and as I immersed myself in her work throughout my life, I found solace and inspiration in her words.

"While Munro may have departed, her legacy remains an enduring testament to the power of storytelling. Her passing serves as a poignant reminder that though individuals may leave this world, their words and art endure, shaping the very essence of human experience and that which connects us."

Susan Doherty

Montreal-based author Susan Doherty has worked at Maclean's Magazine, the International Herald Tribune and ran her own advertising production company for 20 years. She published her debut novel,  A Secret Music , in 2015. Research for her novel led her to the Douglas Hospital where she volunteered with people suffering from extreme psychosis. Doherty's book  The Ghost Garden  is the culmination of her work in the excavation of mental illness; her most recent novel, Monday Rent Boy , was published in 2024.

"After feasting on Austen and Dickens, Alice Munro was the first author who taught me to capture the subtleties of the human condition with simplicity and precision. Her insights remain etched in my memory.

Her insights remain etched in my memory. - Susan Doherty

"As she wrote in The Beggar Maid : 'People are always giving themselves away in small, unconscious ways.'"

Related Stories

• OBITUARY Alice Munro, Canadian author who mastered the short story, dead at 92
• 11 books Alice Munro loves, and you will too
• Alice Munro on the craft of writing short stories
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What’s the Greatest Jazz Record? Here’s a Clue: Miles Davis.

James Kaplan’s new book, “3 Shades of Blue,” examines the lives of Miles, John Coltrane and Bill Evans, and the extraordinary album they made.

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By Peter Keepnews

Peter Keepnews is an editor at The Times.

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3 SHADES OF BLUE: Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Bill Evans, and the Lost Empire of Cool, by James Kaplan

Miles Davis was one of the biggest stars in jazz as well as one of the most innovative and influential musicians. John Coltrane was both a saxophone virtuoso and a fearless explorer whose lifelong musical and spiritual quest attracted a passionate following — and later, as that quest went beyond the boundaries of jazz as many people understood the word, heated criticism. Bill Evans redefined the concept of the piano trio and rewrote the rules of jazz harmony. And on one memorable occasion in 1959, all three participated in the creation of what many consider the greatest jazz record ever made, Davis’s “Kind of Blue.”

Countless words have been devoted to Davis, Coltrane and Evans, including biographies, an autobiography (Davis’s) and at least three books focused on that one record: Ashley Kahn’s “Kind of Blue: The Making of the Miles Davis Masterpiece,” Eric Nisenson’s “The Making of ‘Kind of Blue’: Miles Davis and His Masterpiece” and Richard Williams’s “The Blue Moment: Miles Davis’s ‘Kind of Blue’ and the Remaking of Modern Music.” Do we also need a book that recounts the life stories of all three?

Well, we may not need it, but we have it. And if “3 Shades of Blue: Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Bill Evans, and the Lost Empire of Cool” is neither an essential addition to the jazz literature nor quite the sweeping statement its subtitle promises, it’s certainly a compelling read.

James Kaplan is not a jazz expert — he refers at one point to how “nonprofessional ears” hear a certain recording, presumably meaning his — but he knows how to tell a story, and in “3 Shades of Blue” he has a good one to tell. Or, rather, three good ones.

He never makes it clear why, “Kind of Blue” aside, he considers these three musicians uniquely emblematic of their era in jazz history; why them and not Thelonious Monk, Charles Mingus, Ornette Coleman? But he leaves no doubt that they loomed large, and he deftly draws a line from Davis, who began as a musically untested disciple of the pioneering saxophonist Charlie Parker in the late 1940s, to both Coltrane, who was a largely unknown quantity when Davis hired him in the mid-1950s, and Evans, a similarly under-the-radar white pianist whose presence in Davis’s sextet a few years later raised eyebrows for racial as well as musical reasons. (If he never quite makes a connection between Coltrane and Evans beyond their brief time together with Davis, there’s a good reason: There really isn’t one.)

This book does not contain much that the serious jazz fan won’t already know. Kaplan does offer enough new material, culled from interviews he has done over the years with, among other people, Miles Davis himself, to hold the interest of even the most jaded I’ve-heard-it-all-before jazzbo, but his book seems primarily aimed at the jazz novice.

Moments here, however, are likely to leave the jazz novice feeling lost. For example, early in the book Kaplan quotes Davis’s trumpet protégé Wallace Roney recalling that Davis told him, shortly after their first meeting, “I never liked Brown — Clifford Brown.” Anyone who shares the widely held view that Clifford Brown was one of the outstanding jazz trumpeters of the modern era will probably wonder: Was Davis just trying to get a reaction? Was he, even decades after Brown’s early death, jealous? Or did he really mean what he said? The non-aficionado, on the other hand, will probably wonder: Who’s Clifford Brown? Kaplan doesn’t say, and he doesn’t shed any light on Brown’s place in jazz for another hundred pages.

Telling three life stories in one book is an impressive feat of conciseness for an author who took two hefty volumes (“Frank: The Voice” and “Sinatra: The Chairman”) to tell the story of Frank Sinatra. Inevitably some nuance has been sacrificed, some details left out — I wish crucial sidemen like the saxophonist and composer Wayne Shorter, a key member of Davis’s second great quintet, had gotten more attention — but Kaplan hits the most important notes.

Whether “3 Shades of Blue” amounts to more than three mini-biographies is another question.

Kaplan’s subtitle suggests an ambitious agenda. I’m not entirely sure what he means by the “empire of cool,” but this is his basic thesis:

His three protagonists played a vital role in bringing jazz to an artistic peak in the 1950s and ’60s. Then things went south for the music, in terms of both its quality and the size of its audience, to the point that “jazz today, when it isn’t utterly ignored, is widely disliked.” For Kaplan, the genres known as bop and hard bop, which flourished in those years, provided “almost all of jazz that I want and need.”

It’s undeniably true that jazz had become less popular, and much less a part of the cultural conversation, by the time Coltrane began exploring the music’s outer limits and Davis, shortly after Coltrane’s death in 1967, went electric on albums like “In a Silent Way” and “Bitches Brew.” (In contrast, Evans, who died in 1980, played pretty much the same way his entire career.) But had it become less good?

Kaplan clearly thinks so, and he quotes many others who agree, notably the celebrated critic Stanley Crouch, whom he calls a “grumpy purist” — affectionately, I think — and who aggressively dismissed both electric-era Davis (“firmly on the path of the sellout”) and late Coltrane (“so emotionally narrow and so far removed from his roots and his accomplishments”). But while the music of the bop and hard bop years may be virtually all the jazz Kaplan wants and needs, it’s not necessarily all the jazz other people want and need; some of my favorite jazz records were made in the 1970s and later, and I know I’m not alone in feeling that way.

But that’s just my take, and — to quote the title of a well-known Miles Davis composition that figures prominently in Kaplan’s narrative — so what? James Kaplan has framed “3 Shades of Blue” as both a chronicle of a golden age and a lament for its decline and fall. One doesn’t have to accept the decline-and-fall part to acknowledge that he has done a lovely job of evoking the golden age.

3 SHADES OF BLUE : Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Bill Evans, and the Lost Empire of Cool | By James Kaplan | Penguin Press | 484 pp. | $35

An earlier version of this review, using information from the publisher, included a photograph that had been reversed. The correct image is above.

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Dear Annie: How can I get my novel-writing co-worker to leave me alone?

• Published: May. 14, 2024, 5:33 a.m.

What started with some friendly advice on a shared topic of interest has turned into a daily annoyance for today's Dear Annie reader. Getty Images/Tetra images RF

• Dear Annie, Annie Lane

Dear Annie: I have a younger co-worker who I met at a work social event, and we started talking a bit about novels we are writing as a hobby. A few weeks later, he came by my cubicle to ask me more about writing, so I gave him a few resources to a local writers group. Ever since then, he keeps stopping by, often interrupting my lunchtime.

It’s clear that he never has a specific question for me and will grasp at straws or ask awkward questions just to keep conversation going beyond a normal or considerate time. I don’t mind occasionally chatting, but these constant interruptions when I am busy or trying to take a break are grating on me. I have tried redirecting him or just telling him I am busy, but now he is asking to get together outside of work to talk about our books.

I have no interest in this, and he clearly is not getting the message. I’m finding myself getting anxious over the looming potential of these random, unwanted visits. What should I do? I’m pretty sure he’s harmless, but is it too overboard to go to HR? -- Unwanted Visits from Co-Worker

Dear Unwanted: You mentioned that he is young. Maybe this is his first job and he is treating it more like he is still in college. You could try being direct and telling him you don’t want to get together outside of work and that it’s really difficult to continue your work when he keeps interrupting you. Be clear and kind. If you don’t want to do that, you don’t have to, and going to HR does make sense, especially if he is making you anxious. It really depends on what path will make your work environment best for working.

“How Can I Forgive My Cheating Partner?” is out now! Annie Lane’s second anthology -- featuring favorite columns on marriage, infidelity, communication and reconciliation -- is available as a paperback and e-book. Visit http://www.creatorspublishing.com for more information. Send your questions for Annie Lane to [email protected] .

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A WWII story by The Twilight Zone's Rod Serling is published for the first time

Elizabeth Blair

Rod Serling enlisted in the U.S. Army after graduating high school. He trained to be a paratrooper and was assigned to the 11th Airborne Division's 511th Parachute Infantry Regiment Courtesy of Anne Serling hide caption

Rod Serling enlisted in the U.S. Army after graduating high school. He trained to be a paratrooper and was assigned to the 11th Airborne Division's 511th Parachute Infantry Regiment

There's a reason Rod Serling is considered one of scripted television's most daring and incisive storytellers and much of it comes from his experiences in WWII. The Emmy and Peabody Award-winning creator of The Twilight Zone spent three years as a paratrooper during WWII. He was awarded a Bronze Star for his bravery and a Purple Heart for shrapnel wounds he suffered to his wrist and knee.

Serling enlisted to fight the Nazis the day after he graduated from Binghamton Central High School in New York. Even though he was a slight 5'4, he completed his training as a paratrooper and was assigned to the 11th Airborne of the 511th Parachute Infantry Regiment. He was sent to the Philippines to fight the Japanese.

"He saw major combat in the Philippines on the islands of Leyte and Luzon," says Nicholas Parisi, author of a biography of Serling and president of the Rod Serling Memorial Foundation , "It scarred him for the rest of his life. He saw plenty of friends die. And it really became a defining chapter in his life."

Not long after he returned from the war in 1946, Serling attended Antioch College on the G.I. bill. There, in his early 20s, he penned "First Squad, First Platoon," a short story which is being published for the first time Thursday in The Strand . It was one of his earliest stories, starting a writing career that Serling once said helped him get the war "out of his gut."

"It was like an exercise for him to deal with the demons of war and fear," said his daughter, Jodi Serling. "And he sort of turned it into fiction, although there was a lot of truth to it."

The truth in Serling's short story

The story is set on Leyte Island in "heavy jungle foliage" and a "hostile rain that caked mud on weapons, uniforms, equipment." Each of the five chapters in the 11,000-word story is about a different soldier and how they died.

As he often did in his writing, Serling used the real names of people he knew. One of his closest friends in the squad was a fellow New Yorker named Melvin Levy. In the story, Serling describes Corporal Levy as "the humorist of the squad — the wag, the wit, the guy who lived for laughs."

After several days hiding in muddy foxholes without food and low on ammunition, the squad hears the sound of U.S. Army planes approaching.

When they get low enough, they start dropping rations. He writes:

"...heavy crates without chutes were falling in clusters from the sky—fifty pound boxes of K-rations, a hundred or more of them hurtling earthward. 'Make it Kosher, boys,' Levy screamed, tears rolling down his fat cheeks."

To avoid getting hit by the dropping cargo, the men scramble back down the foxholes. Except for Levy:

"'It's raining chow, boys . . . it's raining chow,' his shrill voice pierced the air. Then there was a sudden dull thud as a crate hit the ground near the first squad's positions, throwing mud into the air and all but covering up the holes with it."

Rod with his father Sam Serling c. 1943. Esther Cooper Serling/Courtesy of Anne Serling hide caption

As in real life, a crate crashes down on Levy, killing him instantly. Serling and the squad looked on in horror.

"I knew that my father had trauma because I vividly remember hearing him wake up in the middle of the night screaming," said another daughter, Anne Serling, "and in the morning when I would ask him what happened, he told me he was dreaming that the enemy was coming at him."

"First Squad, First Platoon" was discovered in a collection of Serling's writings at the University of Wisconsin by Amy Boyle Johnston, author of a book about his career called Unknown Serling . She gave the story to Anne, who included excerpts of it in her memoir As I Knew Him .

"I was so stunned by it, first of all, that my dad was so young," said Anne Serling, "And still so aware and wanting to share his thoughts."

Adding to the trauma, Rod Serling's father died suddenly at age 52 while Rod was still overseas. Anne said he wasn't allowed to return to the U.S. to attend his funeral. "He was always very angry" at the Red Cross for this, she said.

'War should be discussed'

When The Strand asked about publishing this short story, Anne Serling said she and her sister didn't hesitate. She said her father felt strongly that, "These things about the war should be discussed."

Serling dedicated the story "To My Children," even though he didn't have any at the time. He wrote that he didn't want them to be the kind of people who "don't like to remember unpleasant things":

"I want you to know what shrapnel, and "88's"and mortar shells and mustard gas mean. I want you to feel, no matter how vicariously, a semblance of the feeling of a torn limb, a burnt patch of flesh; the crippling, numbing sensation of fear; the hopeless emptiness of fatigue. All these things are complementary to the province of war and friction, and they should be taught in classrooms along with the more heroic aspects of uniforms and flags, honor and patriotism."

With wars ongoing in the Middle East, Ukraine and elsewhere, The Strand 's managing editor Andrew Gulli said he believes the details of Serling's story are important to read right now. Gulli said Serling's "terse" prose includes the "brutality" of war, "Yet [the] characters always retain their humanity. You always felt that you were reading about people that were real, people that you could identify with."

Serling's feelings about war came out in The Twilight Zone . "The Purple Testament" and "A Quality of Mercy," for example, are set in the Philippines and permeated with the same sense of dread found in "First Squad, First Platoon."

"My father said when he came home that he would never, ever again injure another living thing," said Anne Serling. But she said he was also very proud of his service — he wore his paratrooper bracelet "throughout his life."

Rod Serling died June 28, 1975 following heart surgery.

This story was edited for broadcast and digital by Meghan Collins Sullivan .

• WWII veteran
• Rod Serling
• Twilight Zone

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Alice Munro obituary

Canadian short-story writer who won the Nobel prize in 2013 and was often likened to Chekhov and Guy de Maupassant

Few writers have possessed the short-story format as thoroughly as the Canadian author and Nobel laureate Alice Munro , who has died aged 92.

Although her early years as a writer were clouded by the feeling, partly the result of pressure from her publishers, that she should concentrate on producing a novel, she never embraced that genre.

Her one attempt, Lives of Girls and Women (1971), is more accurately described as a collection of interlinking tales. Throughout her career, she developed this method of cross-referencing stories and continuing themes and characters across a collection, most notably in The Beggar Maid (published in Canada as Who Do You Think You Are?), which was nominated for the Booker prize in 1980, and in the Juliet stories of the epiphanic collection Runaway (2004).

For Munro, short stories were the result of practical considerations, rather than choice. As Alice Laidlaw, she had won a scholarship to the University of Western Ontario, but left after two years to marry James Munro at the age of 20; she gave birth to her first child at 22 and later played an important role in running a bookstore in Victoria, British Columbia, with her husband.

Trying simultaneously to establish herself as a writer (she had her first story published in an undergraduate magazine in 1950 and sold a piece to the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation in 1951), she had no time for novel-writing. The short story it had to be.

Routinely likened to Chekhov and Guy de Maupassant, Munro was more radical than the comparison implies. AS Byatt , a longstanding admirer, described how reading Munro made her want to try short fiction herself. Munro stretched and challenged the genre. Not only does she consistently wrongfoot the reader, overturning our expectations of characters and their actions, but she melds several narrative strands together, bringing into one tale several plots.

Jakarta (from The Love of a Good Woman, 1998) is a good example of this method, which has prompted the frequent observation that Munro’s short stories are novels in miniature. Jakarta starts with Kath and Sonje on the beach with Kath’s baby, trying to avoid the disapproving eyes of a group of overly domesticated mothers they have nicknamed the Monicas. Kath and Sonje, in contrast, discuss DH Lawrence and their own lives; clearly these two independent-minded women want more from life than marriage and motherhood seem to offer.

This was familiar ground for Munro, who wrote extensively and sensitively of women’s sexual awakening, escape from dull and politically incompatible husbands, and excruciating separation from children.

The surprise of Jakarta comes when Munro moves forward in time to visit Sonje as she is now, widowed and about to sell her Oregon dance school. It is not Kath who drops in on her inspirational friend, but Kent, Kath’s long divorced and boorish husband, taking with him wife No 3. The story then turns back to cover Kath’s mental disentanglement from her marriage, as well as Sonje’s own travails.

Elsewhere, Munro’s narrative shocks lie in cunning juxtaposition and scandalous honesty. In Five Points (in Friend of My Youth, 1990), Maria, a lonely schoolgirl, bankrupts her immigrant family by using the profits from their shop to pay local boys for sexual favours. Her story is recounted by Neil, the “boyish man beginning to age”, with whom married Brenda has been enjoying an affair. As Neil recalls Maria, Brenda and he stumble into their first argument and their own relationship moves to another, more complex, level. The story recalls the brutal realism of Raymond Carver as much as the American gothic of Carson McCullers.

Like Five Points, the magnificent title story of Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage (2001) is an exercise in what could be termed Canadian gothic.

The apparently dull-witted heroine, Johanna Parry (“No beauty queen, ever”), appears for much of the story to be heading for tragedy. She leaves her position as a housekeeper, tricked into believing she has an offer of marriage by the malicious letter writing of two schoolgirls. But the force of her delusion, not to mention her personality, makes that marriage come about, and life with her husband, once a drunken bankrupt, a success.

At the close of the story it is Edith, one of the letter writers, who feels foolish and confused, and Johanna who has transcended expectations. Munro’s penultimate and bleakest work, Too Much Happiness (2009), sees characters facing infanticide, cancer and sexual perversion, with Munro working against anticipated outcomes in much the same way.

Munro said of her fiction: “There is always a starting point in reality.” Her own starting point was the town of Wingham, Huron County, Ontario, where she was born, to Anne (nee Chamney), a former schoolteacher, and Robert Laidlaw, a fox farmer. They are frequent presences in her stories, as is the town, which appears variously renamed as Jubilee, Dalgleish, Hanratty, Logan, Carstairs and Walley.

Much of her fiction is closely tied to the smalltown farming communities of the area with whom she identified (she once described herself as “educated to be a farmer’s wife”).

On her marriage to James in 1951, Munro moved away, first to Vancouver, but after her divorce in 1972 she returned to Ontario, eventually settling with her second husband, the geographer Gerald Fremlin, whom she married in 1976, in Clinton, only about 20 miles from Wingham.

The View from Castle Rock (2006) contains some of Munro’s most personal stories, drawing on pieces she had been working on for years about her family history. It is an account of the pioneers from whose stock she came (her ancestors, the Scottish Presbyterian Laidlaws and the Irish Anglican Chamneys, were among the first settlers in Upper Canada in the early 19th century). But it is also something of a love letter to Ontario, a record of disappearing towns and a disappearing way of life.

A writer’s writer, Munro reached international critical attention when her work began to feature in the New Yorker, from 1977, and she continued to be feted: her last work, Dear Life (2012), published when she was 81, was as strongly received as any other. Indeed, the near tragedy of the opening story, To Reach Japan, and the frank reflections on death and dementia in Dolly and In Sight of the Lake suggest a writer undiminished by age. But she shunned the literary limelight, claiming that she knew of her shortlisting for the Nobel, awarded in 2013, only the day before the prize was announced.

The esteem in which she was held was evident in the genuine, warm response from writers around the world, including her compatriot Margaret Atwood , who described Munro’s win as a “magnificent occasion”. Munro’s own reaction was self-effacing. In a statement issued through her publishers, she said: “I am particularly glad that winning this award will please so many Canadians. I am happy too that this will bring more attention to Canadian writing.” She also noted that the prize was “a wonderful thing for the short story”.

Munro constantly distanced her life from her fiction. “Some of these stories are closer to my own life than others are, but not one of them is as close as people seem to think,” she wrote in the introduction to The Moons of Jupiter (1982).

It is easy to see why the two can become confused, however. Castle Rock reveals the roots of several of her fictions, such as A Wilderness Station (Open Secrets, 1994), which takes as its starting point the death of one of her ancestors, felled by a tree. Later she would describe the four final stories of Dear Life as “the closest things I have to say about my own life”. Interestingly, the focus of this raw quartet is childhood trauma and the mother figure. Her own mother died in 1959 after 20 years of Parkinson’s disease.

Munro’s approach to writing meant that any basis in reality was distorted in the long process of refining and rewriting her work (her manuscripts, she said, were long, loose screeds). Who Do You Think You Are? was pulled from the press at the author’s insistence (and her own expense) one month before publication, and half the book reorganised and rewritten.

Munro had constantly experimented with first- and third-person narratives during its creation, and worried whether the real focus of her writing was Rose (the subject of many stories) or another character, Janet. Her perfectionism paid off: like her first publication, Dance of the Happy Shades (1968), and The Progress of Love (1986), Who Do You Think You Are? won the governor general’s award for fiction in Canada. In 2009, unusually for a short story writer, she won the Man Booker International prize for her overall contribution to fiction.

Her sparkling intelligence, sly humour and sense of narrative marked her out as one of the outstanding authors of her generation. Her long service to the short story made Munro important, and this was recognised in reviews of Lying Under the Apple Tree (2011), a selection of her stories. Writers seldom really change the direction of a genre: she did.

Fremlin died in 2013. With her first husband she had four daughters, one of whom, Catherine, died shortly after birth. Munro is survived by her daughters Sheila, Jenny and Andrea.

• Alice Munro
• Short stories
• Nobel prize in literature
• Margaret Atwood

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Alice Munro, Nobel literature winner revered as short story master, dead at 92

FILE - Canadian author Alice Munro poses for a photograph at the Canadian Consulate’s residence in New York on Oct. 28, 2002. Munro, the Canadian literary giant who became one of the world’s most esteemed contemporary authors and one of history’s most honored short story writers, has died at age 92. (AP Photo/Paul Hawthorne, File)

FILE - Canadian author Alice Munro is photographed during an interview in Victoria, B.C. Tuesday, Dec.10, 2013. Munro, the Canadian literary giant who became one of the world’s most esteemed contemporary authors and one of history’s most honored short story writers, has died at age 92. (Chad Hipolito/The Canadian Press via AP, File)

FILE - Nobel Prize-winning Canadian author Alice Munro attends a ceremony held by the Royal Canadian Mint where they unveiled a 99.99% pure silver five-dollar coin in Victoria, B.C., on March 24, 2014. Munro, the Canadian literary giant who became one of the world’s most esteemed contemporary authors and one of history’s most honored short story writers, has died at age 92. (Chad Hipolito/The Canadian Press via AP, File)

FILE - Writer Alice Munro attends the opening night of the International Festival of Authors in Toronto on Wednesday Oct. 21, 2009. Munro, the Canadian literary giant who became one of the world’s most esteemed contemporary authors and one of history’s most honored short story writers, has died at age 92. (Chris Young/The Canadian Press via AP)

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Nobel laureate Alice Munro, the Canadian literary giant who became one of the world’s most esteemed contemporary authors and one of history’s most honored short story writers, has died at age 92.

A spokesperson for publisher Penguin Random House Canada said Munro, winner of the Nobel literary prize in 2013, died Monday at home in Port Hope, Ontario. Munro had been in frail health for years and often spoke of retirement, a decision that proved final after the author’s 2012 collection, “Dear Life.”

Often ranked with Anton Chekhov, John Cheever and a handful of other short story writers, Munro achieved stature rare for an art form traditionally placed beneath the novel. She was the first lifelong Canadian to win the Nobel and the first recipient cited exclusively for short fiction. Echoing the judgment of so many before, the Swedish academy pronounced her a “master of the contemporary short story” who could “accommodate the entire epic complexity of the novel in just a few short pages.”

Munro, little known beyond Canada until her late 30s, also became one of the few short story writers to enjoy ongoing commercial success. Sales in North America alone exceeded 1 million copies and the Nobel announcement raised “Dear Life” to the high end of The New York Times’ bestseller list for paperback fiction. Other popular books included “Too Much Happiness,” “The View from Castle Rock” and “The Love of a Good Woman.”

Over a half century of writing, Munro perfected one of the greatest tricks of any art form: illuminating the universal through the particular, creating stories set around Canada that appealed to readers far away. She produced no single definitive work, but dozens of classics that were showcases of wisdom, technique and talent — her inspired plot twists and artful shifts of time and perspective; her subtle, sometimes cutting humor; her summation of lives in broad dimension and fine detail; her insights into people across age or background, her genius for sketching a character, like the adulterous woman introduced as “short, cushiony, dark-eyed, effusive. A stranger to irony.”

Her best known fiction included “The Beggar Maid,” a courtship between an insecure young woman and an officious rich boy who becomes her husband; “Corrie,” in which a wealthy young woman has an affair with an architect “equipped with a wife and young family"; and “The Moons of Jupiter,” about a middle-aged writer who visits her ailing father in a Toronto hospital and shares memories of different parts of their lives.

“I think any life can be interesting,” Munro said during a 2013 post-prize interview for the Nobel Foundation. “I think any surroundings can be interesting.”

Disliking Munro, as a writer or as a person, seemed almost heretical. The wide and welcoming smile captured in her author photographs was complemented by a down-to-earth manner and eyes of acute alertness, fitting for a woman who seemed to pull stories out of the air the way songwriters discovered melodies. She was admired without apparent envy, placed by the likes of Jonathan Franzen, John Updike and Cynthia Ozick at the very top of the pantheon. Munro’s daughter, Sheila Munro, wrote a memoir in which she confided that “so unassailable is the truth of her fiction that sometimes I even feel as though I’m living inside an Alice Munro story.” Fellow Canadian author Margaret Atwood called her a pioneer for women, and for Canadians.

“Back in the 1950s and 60s, when Munro began, there was a feeling that not only female writers but Canadians were thought to be both trespassing and transgressing,” Atwood wrote in a 2013 tribute published in the Guardian after Munro won the Nobel. “The road to the Nobel wasn’t an easy one for Munro: the odds that a literary star would emerge from her time and place would once have been zero.”

Although not overtly political, Munro witnessed and participated in the cultural revolution of the 1960s and ‘70s and permitted her characters to do the same. She was a farmer’s daughter who married young, then left her husband in the 1970s and took to “wearing miniskirts and prancing around,” as she recalled during a 2003 interview with The Associated Press. Many of her stories contrasted the generation of Munro’s parents with the more open-ended lives of their children, departing from the years when housewives daydreamed “between the walls that the husband was paying for.”

Moviegoers would become familiar with “The Bear Came Over the Mountain,” the improbably seamless tale of a married woman with memory loss who has an affair with a fellow nursing home patient, a story further complicated by her husband’s many past infidelities. “The Bear” was adapted by Sarah Polley into the 2006 feature film “Away from Her,” which brought an Academy Award nomination for Julie Christie. In 2014, Kristen Wiig starred in “Hateship, Loveship,” an adaptation of the story “Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage,” in which a housekeeper leaves her job and travels to a distant rural town to meet up with a man she believes is in love with her — unaware the romantic letters she has received were concocted by his daughter and a friend.

Even before the Nobel, Munro received honors from around the English-language world, including Britain’s Man Booker International Prize and the National Book Critics Circle award in the U.S., where the American Academy of Arts and Letters voted her in as an honorary member. In Canada, she was a three-time winner of the Governor’s General Award and a two-time winner of the Giller Prize.

Munro was a short story writer by choice, and, apparently, by design. Judith Jones, an editor at Alfred A. Knopf who worked with Updike and Anne Tyler, did not want to publish “Lives of Girls & Women,” her only novel, writing in an internal memo that “there’s no question the lady can write but it’s also clear she is primarily a short story writer.”

Munro would acknowledge that she didn’t think like a novelist.

“I have all these disconnected realities in my own life, and I see them in other people’s lives,” she told the AP. “That was one of the problems, why I couldn’t write novels. I never saw things hanging together too well.”

Alice Ann Laidlaw was born in Wingham, Ontario, in 1931, and spent much of her childhood there, a time and place she often used in her fiction, including the four autobiographical pieces that concluded “Dear Life.” Her father was a fox farmer, her mother a teacher and the family’s fortunes shifted between middle class and working poor, giving the future author a special sensitivity to money and class. Young Alice was often absorbed in literature, starting with the first time she was read Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Little Mermaid.” She was a compulsive inventor of stories and the “sort of child who reads walking upstairs and props a book in front of her when she does the dishes.”

A top student in high school, she received a scholarship to study at the University of Western Ontario, majoring in journalism as a “cover-up” for her pursuit of literature. She was still an undergraduate when she sold a story about a lonely teacher, “The Dimensions of a Shadow,” to CBC Radio. She was also publishing work in her school’s literary journal.

One fellow student read “Dimensions” and wrote to the then-Laidlaw, telling her the story reminded him of Chekhov. The student, Gerald Fremlin, would become her second husband. Another fellow student, James Munro, was her first husband. They married in 1951, when she was only 20, and had four children, one of whom died soon after birth.

Settling with her family in British Columbia, Alice Munro wrote between trips to school, housework and helping her husband at the bookstore that they co-owned and would turn up in some of her stories. She wrote one book in the laundry room of her house, her typewriter placed near the washer and dryer. Flannery O’Connor, Carson McCullers and other writers from the American South inspired her, through their sense of place and their understanding of the strange and absurd.

Isolated from the literary center of Toronto, she did manage to get published in several literary magazines and to attract the attention of an editor at Ryerson Press (later bought out by McGraw Hill). Her debut collection, “Dance of the Happy Shades,” was released in 1968 with a first printing of just under 2,700 copies. A year later it won the Governor’s General Award and made Munro a national celebrity — and curiosity. “Literary Fame Catches City Mother Unprepared,” read one newspaper headline.

“When the book first came they sent me a half dozen copies. I put them in the closet. I didn’t look at them. I didn’t tell my husband they had come, because I couldn’t bear it. I was afraid it was terrible,” Munro told the AP. “And one night, he was away, and I forced myself to sit down and read it all the way through, and I didn’t think it was too bad. And I felt I could acknowledge it and it would be OK.”

By the early ’70s, she had left her husband, later observing that she was not “prepared to be a submissive wife.” Her changing life was best illustrated by her response to the annual Canadian census. For years, she had written down her occupation as “housewife.” In 1971, she switched to “writer.”

Over the next 40 years, her reputation and readership only grew, with many of her stories first appearing in The New Yorker. Her prose style was straightforward, her tone matter of fact, but her plots revealed unending disruption and disappointments: broken marriages, violent deaths, madness and dreams unfulfilled, or never even attempted. “Canadian Gothic” was one way she described the community of her childhood, a world she returned to when, in middle age, she and her second husband relocated to nearby Clinton.

“Shame and embarrassment are driving forces for Munro’s characters,” Atwood wrote, “just as perfectionism in the writing has been a driving force for her: getting it down, getting it right, but also the impossibility of that.”

She had the kind of curiosity that would have made her an ideal companion on a long train ride, imagining the lives of the other passengers. Munro wrote the story “Friend of My Youth,” in which a man has an affair with his fiancee’s sister and ends up living with both women, after an acquaintance told her about some neighbors who belonged to a religion that forbade card games. The author wanted to know more — about the religion, about the neighbors.

Even as a child, Munro had regarded the world as an adventure and mystery and herself as an observer, walking around Wingham and taking in the homes as if she were a tourist. In “The Peace of Utrecht,” an autobiographical story written in the late 1960s, a woman discovers an old high school notebook and remembers a dance she once attended with an intensity that would envelop her whole existence.

“And now an experience which seemed not at all memorable at the time,” Munro wrote, “had been transformed into something curiously meaningful for me, and complete; it took in more than the girls dancing and the single street, it spread over the whole town, its rudimentary pattern of streets and its bare trees and muddy yards just free of the snow, over the dirt roads where the lights of cars appeared, jolting toward the town, under an immense pale wash of sky.”

This story has been updated to correct the title of “The Beggar Maid.”

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Gov. Kristi Noem says "I want the truth to be out there" after viral stories of killing her dog, false Kim Jong Un claim

By Kaia Hubbard

Updated on: May 5, 2024 / 6:40 PM EDT / CBS News

Washington — South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem said on Sunday that she's "not retracting anything" after facing backlash for stories about killing her young dog and a false claim about meeting with Kim Jong Un, although she said the latter story will be adjusted in her book.

"I'm so proud of this book and what it will bring to people," Noem said on "Face the Nation" on Sunday. "I'm not retracting anything."

• Transcript: South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem on "Face the Nation," May 5, 2024

The Republican governor, who had been considered among a list of possible running mates for former President Donald Trump in his latest White House bid, has been widely criticized after writing in her new book about killing her dog decades ago, a story that went viral in recent days.   

She writes in her book that the 14-month-old wirehaired pointer named Cricket had shown aggressive behavior, while she was training the dog for pheasant hunting. She said on Sunday that she made the choice to protect her children from a "dangerous animal." 

"I would ask everybody in the country to put themselves in that situation," she said. "As a mom, I made a choice between protecting my children, and protecting them from a dangerous animal that was killing livestock and attacking people."

But the anecdote has spurred questions about her political future. Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich told Politico that Noem's writing about killing her dog "ended any possibility of her being picked as VP."

Noem defended the anecdote and the book more broadly, saying it's "filled with vulnerable painful moments in my life."

"I want the truth to be out there and to understand that these animals were attacking my children, that we live on a farm and a ranch and that tough decisions are made many times and it is to protect people," Noem said.  

She added that the reason the story is in the book is because "people need to understand who I am" and some of the "difficult decisions" she's made. She said that the story is "well known in South Dakota" and her "political opponents have tried to use against me for years."

In the book, Noem writes that the first thing she would do if she got to the White House that was different from President Biden is make sure Mr. Biden's dog, Commander, was nowhere on the grounds. Commander has since been moved to an undisclosed location after biting several Secret Service agents, but Noem writes that she would say "Commander say hello to Cricket."

"Well, No. 1, Joe Biden's dog has attacked 24 Secret Service people," Noem said. "So how many people is enough people to be attacked and dangerously hurt before you make a decision on a dog?"

When "Face the Nation" moderator Margaret Brennan asked if that meant Commander should be shot, Noem answered "that what's the president should be accountable to."

The South Dakota governor has also faced scrutiny for details in the book about mentioning a meeting with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un during her time in Congress that appeared to be an error. Noem said the anecdote shouldn't have been included in the book and has been adjusted. 

"This is an anecdote that I asked to have removed because I think it's appropriate at this point in time," she said.

The book's publisher confirmed Sunday the anecdote would be removed "upon reprint of the print edition and as soon as technically possible in on the audio and ebook editions."

Kaia Hubbard is a politics reporter for CBS News Digital based in Washington, D.C.

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Why conservative media is suddenly turning on Kristi Noem

The Trump-era right wing has proved it will put up with plenty — until it decides you’re a political liability.

When South Dakota Gov. Kristi L. Noem (R) sat down with Fox News last week amid a growing tempest over her killing her dog, Sean Hannity gave her the softballs-in-a-storm treatment often reserved for Donald Trump .

Hannity mused that perhaps there wasn’t really a difference between Noem shooting her own dog and having someone else euthanize it. He whatabout-ed by pointing to President Biden’s dog biting Secret Service agents, and posited about aggressive dogs: “It’s a sad thing to do, but at some point, doesn’t it become the responsible thing to?”

On Monday night, Newsmax host Eric Bolling offered an even more ham-handed attempt to explain it all away. He offered that perhaps the inclusion of the dog story in Noem’s book and an apparently false anecdote about meeting Kim Jong Un were the work of a “ liberal plant ” book editor. (Noem assured him that these were her own words.)

Something has happened since then, though. Conservative media has begun to turn on Noem, actually grilling her over her book and even ridiculing her.

Why? It’s pretty evident, and it’s the same reason conservative media and the GOP often turn on their own after putting up with plenty: She’s become a perceived liability for the brand.

By Tuesday morning, Newsmax was giving Noem a very different treatment . A host told Noem he didn’t think she was in the mix for Trump’s running mate anymore. (“Really? And why is that?” Noem responded.) He suggested Noem’s brazen effort to not actually deny meeting Kim would continue to haunt her.

Fox Business host Stuart Varney an hour later peppered Noem with five questions about whether Noem had broached the dog story with Trump. “Enough, Stuart,” an exasperated Noem responded. “This interview is ridiculous — what you are doing right now. So you need to stop.”

Noem suggested they talk about other issues, but Varney said they were out of time. “Oh, well of course we are,” Noem responded sarcastically.

By Tuesday night, with plenty of people asking why Noem was still talking, she finally canceled a Fox News interview (citing bad weather).

Clearly irked by the late cancellation, hosts Greg Gutfeld and Dana Perino proceeded to roast Noem by having Perino do the interview as the governor. They pointed to how Noem, despite insisting she had just learned of problems with her book, had previously recorded it as an audio book .

“I said some words that were written about me, and they were in a certain order of — they call them sentences,” deadpanned Perino-as-Noem. “And so I read those aloud. I don’t know if that means I’ve read the book.”

Perino-as-Noem added: “A little known fact: Another one of my dogs, his name was Ghost Writer. And I killed him this morning.”

It’s all quite an un-conservative media thing to do in the Trump era. Fox and Newsmax hosts have become studied at trying to explain away Republican controversy as the work of nefarious and censorious political opponents — as they initially tried to do with Noem. Why would they suddenly take issue with Noem telling an apparent falsehood about meeting with Kim, after years of ignoring Trump’s own penchant for saying oodles of bizarre and false things ? (Trump has uttered several false statements specifically about Kim , in fact.)

The answer is that conservative media and the GOP can ignore and try to cover for plenty — until they decide you’ve become a problem for the red team.

Former congressman Madison Cawthorn (R-N.C.) was accused of multiple instances of misconduct from his college days, told multiple falsehoods about his biography and faced repeated driving and gun infractions. But his party didn’t set about taking him out in a 2022 primary until he did a podcast interview in which he claimed a fellow lawmaker invited him to an “orgy” and accused Republicans in Washington of using cocaine . Republicans expressed concern that his problems were suddenly becoming their problems .

Indicted former congressman George Santos (R-N.Y.) was allowed to stick around for months despite his abundant legal and ethical problems and telling an even more remarkable number of lies about his own bio. A big apparent reason for his ultimate expulsion: Multiple vulnerable New York Republicans worried he would compromise their own reelections .

Further back, Republicans put up with former congressman Steve King’s (R-Iowa) controversial and even racist remarks for years before deciding to turn against him in 2019 for well-publicized remarks about white nationalism to the New York Times. An Iowa GOP strategist explained at the time that King had become “ the largest in-kind contribution Nancy Pelosi’s received . … It’s untenable for our candidates to have to answer for someone like that.”

And more recently, we’ve seen some on the right begin to cast a more skeptical eye on Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) . This is not because she has espoused bizarre conspiracy theories or unapologetically appeared at a conference hosted by a white nationalist , but because they appear to worry that her attempted ouster of House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) and her Russia apologia are hurting the party’s 2024 prospects.

“She is dragging our brand down,” Sen. Thom Tillis (R-N.C.) said two weeks ago. “She — not the Democrats — are the biggest risk to us getting back to a majority.”

If you look closely at Noem’s increasingly contentious interviews on conservative media, you’ll see an acknowledgment that this is really about the same thing.

It seems to be sending a signal that it would be better for all involved for Noem to fade away, and certainly that Trump should think twice about putting her on the ticket.

“I’m not sure anybody supports you on shooting the dog,” Varney told Noem, adding: “We’ve been consumed with emails saying, ‘I won’t vote for this person. I won’t vote for Trump if he puts her in the vice-presidential spot.’ ”

Newsmax host Rob Finnerty had said an hour earlier: “I’m not deliberately trying to be adversarial. I just — Donald Trump winning in November is very important.”