Every November writers of all types put their pens to paper – or their fingers to keyboards – to participate in the annual marathon-writing event known as National Novel Writing Month, or NaNoWriMo for short. The goal of NaNoWriMo is to write a novel of at least 50,000 words in 30 days.

You may be skeptical about the quality of a novel written in such a short time, but keep in mind that since the challenge began in 2006, over 400 novels written during NaNoWriMo have been traditionally published. Here are several that you can check out from the JMRL catalog:

Wool by Hugh Howey – In a future toxic landscape, a community that lives in an underground silo is rocked by the desire of Sheriff Holston, who has upheld the group’s rules for years, to go outside, setting in motion events that kindle the fire of revolution.

Cinder by Marissa Meyer – As plague ravages the overcrowded Earth, observed by a ruthless lunar people, Cinder, a gifted mechanic and cyborg, becomes involved with handsome Prince Kai and must uncover secrets about her past in order to protect the world in this futuristic take on the Cinderella story. (The subsequent novels in the trilogy, “Scarlet” and “Cress,” also began as NaNoWriMo projects.)

Modern Girls by Jennifer S. Brown – A young Jewish woman living in Manhattan in 1935 becomes pregnant after a one-night stand and wrestles with her options as she discovers that her Yiddish-speaking mother, who longs for more than the life of a housewife, is also expecting.

The Beautiful Land by Alan Averill – An explorer of parallel timelines, Takahiro O’Leary, discovering that Samira, the woman he loves, is in danger of never existing, will do anything to stop that from happening, but soon discovers that to save Sam, he must save the world.

Persistence of Memory by Amelia Atwater-Rhodes – Diagnosed with schizophrenia as a child, sixteen-year-old Erin has spent half of her life in therapy and on drugs, but now must face the possibility of weird things in the real world, including shapeshifting friends and her “alter,” a centuries-old vampire. (Available in ebook form only.)

The Art of Crash Landing by Melissa DeCarlo – Chasing a possible inheritance from her grandmother, Mattie Wallace, homeless and pregnant, travels to her mother’s hometown in Oklahoma where she tries to reconcile the town’s memory of her mother with the broken alcoholic she became and stop her own downward spiral.