Tiara Letourneau, you e leading NaNoWriMos very first Tunisia writers group. What do you expect to be the biggest challenge for this years NaNo novelists in Tunisia?
We have a lot of challenges ahead of us but there are two in particular that deserve mentioning. The first is a very real language/communication barrier between our participants. Most of our participants will speak English, French, Arabic or some combination thereof, and may have some difficulty communicating with each other. This also makes it difficult for some of our members to access information on the site which is mostly in English, though we’re trying to remedy that. Probably the biggest challenge, though, is gaining access to computers. Unlike North America and Europe, North African homes are generally not equipped with a computer, and while it’s not hard to find one, the cost of using it for the 50-70 hours needed to write a NaNovel can be prohibitive. All the same, we’re excited to try and we’ve got a whole month to sort out the details. Tunisia has a penchant for the night life, so I anticipate we’ll have at least a couple of all-nighters with dark Arabic coffee, sweet mint
