NaNoWriMo Complete

I just can't believe how quickly November flew by but that's probably because my fingers were securely taped to the keyboard. I stuck to my daily target though and am delighted to say that I reached the grand total of 51,000 words by 30th November.

Its amazing how much the deadline concentrated my mind and if there were days when I didn't feel like writing the thought of not reaching the target spurred me on. I've tried setting myself a target number of words to write each day in the past, but there are just days when life gets in the way, or I'm feeling unispired and it just doesn't happen.

But the good thing now is that I know I can do it and so I must continue because although I've written the 50,000, the novel isn't complete. I imagine that a good percentage of what I've written will end up being edited out and so I've set myself a target of 1,000 words a day, five days a week in the hope that this will be more manageable and therefore achieveable.

The trouble though with the NaNoWriMo though is that during November I decided to ignore the other deadline which is Christmas. Unfortunately Christmas is one deadline which is immovable so now I've really got to get my act into gear. Fingers crossed it can get all that done too!

Bye for now and I hope that anyone reading this is managing to get on with Christmas without neglecting their own writing too much.

NaNoWriMo

Hi again

There has been quite a big gap between my first and second post, for two reasons mainly.

The first is that I wasn't sure if this had been posted out to the ethernet never to be found by anyone else - yes I'm quite a novice with technology in some respects. The response from Jayne - thank you so much Jayne - reassured me that I wasn't talking to myself (as I spend half of my life!) and has spurred me on to post again.

The second is that I have been involved in NaNoWriMo for the first time which has absorbed all my writing time.

We're into the final week of NaNoWriMo and heading towards the 50,000 words target. In the last three weeks I have managed to write 38,000 words of my novel and I am somewhat astounded by this. It took me at least a year to even get this far with my yet unedited first novel and the fact that I have done this is three weeks is little short of a miracle. It just goes to show what you can achieve when you have a deadline.

The prospect of 50,000 words was incredibly daunting at the beginning of November, but I split the word count into 30 days and made sure that I wrote that number of words each day. On some days I try to do more than that so that I have a bit of a buffer, especially for the weekends which are usually even more hectic than the weekdays.

Now don't get me wrong, some of those words (if not most of them) are probably completely rubbish but the fact is that they are there - and can and will be edited. My only problem now is trying to keep up with the plot and as it is an historical novel, research. But I've only got another 12,000 to go and I'm determined to get there by the end of the week.

So thank you NaNoWriMo, you have inspired me and I'll definitely do it again next year.

So Wanna be a Writer

My First Blog

Hello to anyone who might be out there.

This is my first blog. Crosses fingers that anyone might actually be out there and might read this.

I've been a writer for just as long as I can remember but have had more rejections that I actually care to contemplate. Just when I was thinking about giving it all up for good I had my first short story published courtesy of a Writers' Forum competition. The short story was not a "winner" but a just about about got there and was published in The Weekly News. To see my name published (and not just for a reader's letter) and to actually receive payment for it was just about the most exhilarating thing I have ever experienced and it gave me the boost to carry one.

I've been tramping about other people's blogs for a while now but never had the bottle to do it for myself. My technological expertise isn't up to much either, so please forgive me. Perhaps I'll learn as I go along.

I have written the first draft of a contempory woman's novel but have got lost somewhere in the first edit. Despairing of gettin anywhere with it though, I've decided to put it to one side for a month and have joined NaNoWriMo for the duration of November. After week one I've written 15,000 words which is something of a phenonmenum for me so I'm hoping that I can carry on for the rest of the month and reach the 15,000 target. Again fingers crossed.

Anyway, don't want to bore anyone who might be reading this but would welcome any comments from all you writers out there.

Yours

Sowannabe A Writer