No Longer a NaNoWriMo Virgin

So what the heck is NaNoWriMo I hear you ask? It stands for National Novel Writing Month and it is where aspiring and established authors sign up to write 50,000 plus words in 30 days i.e. throughout the whole month of November.

I have been meaning to do it for several years now, but as each November has come around I have already been working on a project and haven’t wanted to break from it or the November diary has just been so busy that I wouldn’t stand a chance of completing it.

This year was different though, apart from two days the diary was empty and as November approached I made sure I kept it that way. Plus, I was in a position to start a new work in progress, so the omens were good. It was now or never.

In some ways it’s just a bit of fun, if you don’t make your 50K you don’t lose anything and the great gods of NaNoWriMo don’t strike you down with thunderbolts. In other ways it is a great help to anyone serious about tackling a first draft.

Signing up to the site is totally free and as you go through each day of writing you can update that day’s word count to your grand total, which is then plotted on a bar chart so you can easily see how you are progressing. Once you have completed your profile you sign up to a home region in your location. For me this wasn’t that easy as there wasn’t a group for Surrey, so I simply waded into the London group…I did live there for nearly thirty years so I reckoned that would get me an entry pass. Within your region various write ins are set up in cafes and other locations so that you can go along and meet fellow WriMoers who are rising to the challenge and maybe find a writing buddy. You can also collect milestone badges along the way too.

So how did it work for me? Pretty darned good! I am naturally quite competitive so although you are only really competing against yourself I set my sights on the bar chart…it HAD to go up every day and either meet the daily target of 1667 words a day or exceed it. I also pitched myself against other WriMoers in my region; they had no idea of course. Your total word count is given at the foot of your profile photo and as their counts rose each day mine had to rise higher and then as 50,000 came closer I had to get there first.

After 26 days I had written 50,297 words of a new first draft and gained my winner’s certificate! This is the fastest I have ever written 50,000+ words, if left to my own devices I can be one of the world’s best procrastinators, there’s always room for just one more cup of tea before I sit down to write…

I still have a way to go though, this first draft needs to be around 90-100,000 words before I can see it finished and ready for the first edits. As I am quite a detailed planner I know exactly what is going to happen in the rest of the book so I hope I can keep the momentum up after the end of November. The next goal is a completed first draft by Christmas. So what’s this new WIP I have been working on…well, that’s for another blog post! ;)

If you fancy your hand writing the first draft of the book that’s been batting around in your head for the last few years, give it a go in 2018. Even if you don't make 50K you've at least started it and hopefully got the first few chapters under your belt.

www.nanowrimo.org

Will I be doing it next year? Ohhhhhh Yes!

A Quick Catch Up

Apologies for the lack of blog posts recently, such a lot has been going on with several projects in the air at once. I will be back in the bloggersphere more frequently from now on. I hope you all had great summers and fabulous holidays.

Here’s a quick catch up on what I’ve been up to over the last couple of months.

I’m currently working through the second draft of a completed novel aimed at a young adult audience. If you like action adventure with a bit of thriller thrown in then I’d like to introduce you all to Ben Weir. In the first book in his adventures he finds himself caught up in the activities of MI9, they’re a bit like MI6 only better! Even more secret and they don’t have to work within the law, which gives a lot of scope for foiling and defeating some of the worst villains around. When this second draft has a bit more meat on it I’ll drop you some tasty morsels as to what Ben gets up to.

The thing I am really excited about is happening on the 1st November…I am desperate for the start gun to get me off my writing blocks for NaNoWriMo…never heard of it? Well, it stands for National Novel Writing Month and happens every November. I hope to write the first draft of book one in a science fantasy trilogy I’ve had in a planning stage for a couple of years. It will be so good to finally start this now that I have other projects completed and out of the way giving me space to devote to it. If you want to know more about NaNoWriMo then shoot over to their website www.nanowrimo.com - if you’re wanting a framework and a bit of deadline pressure for your next WIP then it could be for you.

My holiday this year was revisiting a couple of the fabulous Channel Islands in preparation for starting the fantasy trilogy. I’ve been many times to the various islands in the group. Walking through the beautiful differing landscapes the islands have to offer, plus their varied and interesting histories, inspired me to come up with the idea for the trilogy. I will reveal more as time goes on, plus lots of pictures. One of the absolute highlights was watching dolphins arcing out of the water as they swam alongside the small ferry from Guernsey to Sark…we were even lucky enough to see them again on the return journey!

On the crafting front, part of the autumn bounty for the market stall came in the form of quinces from my neighbour. I turned them into quince and cardamom jelly, which, even if I say so myself, is delicious. I also spent a day at the Knitting and Stitching Show at Alexandra Palace on 11^th October. After a few hours of wandering around my head was exploding with ideas, colours, yarns and fabrics. If you’re interested and haven’t been, I suggest you get yourself along to the next one. I’m already planning my visit to the show next March at Olympia in London. There are various shows at venues around the UK and Ireland so check out www.theknittingandstitchingshow.com for more information. I’ll end this crafty bit with a picture of some of the amazing textile art on show. This image of a Maasai village was actually a quilt where the textures of the various fabrics reflected the natural textures of the sand, tree bark, leaves etc.

Finally here’s an update on the World War 1 fiction book based on my great uncle Basil. If you remember from my previous blog posts I was writing a piece of fiction around the actual war diaries for his battalion. Well, I got into a bit a hole as I was trying to stay true to the diary entries, but as I got further into the book the events timeline wouldn’t fit easily into the story I had planned. We’re talking square pegs and round holes, and the more I tried to make the two fit, the more I wrote myself into a deeper and deeper hole. So, I put him away while I finished off other projects. I am in the process of picking apart what I have written (about three quarters of the first draft has been completed) and reworking both story and actual diary events so that I can crack on with him anew, probably in the New Year now. His story is too important to pass by.