By now, you probably know that National Novel Writing Month has begun.  You might also know that the objective is to write 50,000 words during the month of November.  What you might not know is that NaNo is a great antidote to bad critiques.

Back in the dark ages, (well, okay, 2009), I stumbled on NaNoWrimo.  But that wasn’t the beginning, not by a long shot.  In the early Pleistocene, I wanted to be a writer (yes, kids, people wrote back then, and not just on stone tablets, so hush or we’ll never get through this).  I wrote my first story when I was nine, about a cat named Marge.  As an adult, I decided I’d probably better take some classes because, after all, there’s more to the world than cats named Marge (although if I’d’ve been able to predict the popularity of cats on the internet, this would be a…