Happy Birthday!

It's a very special day today as two very important people were born on this date. My sister was born 22 years today and ruined my chances of being an only child forever :-P . As for the other very special lady, I think it would be fair to say that "it is a truth universally acknowledged" that she is very well known would have been celebrating her 235th birthday had she been alive today.

I am of course talking about Jane Austen, author of my favourite novel Pride and Prejudice. She has been a huge influence on my writing and I absolutely love all of her books. I have to confess something to you though. I only properly discovered Jane Austen earlier this year. I had heard of her of course but I had never read any of her books or seen their televised adaptations- it's very embarassing to me having to admit this to you.

For christmas last year, I was given 100 Classic books for the Nintendo DS and seeing the novel on there I decided to give it a go and ever since then I am quite literally hooked on Austen to the point of obsession. After reading the rest of her novels and falling in love with Mr Darcy I felt inspire to write again, despite having never written anything other than fanfiction and the odd few stories in my childhood.

It was P&P which made me feel like I could do anything, and that was when my first novel idea popped into my head. It's an incomplete Regency story with the powerful head strong Austen inspired heroine and a multidimensional male lead. Incomplete as it may be, the idea that I had got me writing again, and I think that had I not read p&p I would not have completed my first novel in Nano and would not be sat here typing this now.

Good Tidings we bring...

I have excellent news which I wanted to share with all of you. I am pleased to finally announce that I have completed my first draft of my novel 'the stepmother'. I have decided to leave the editing of the novel until after christmas and have a short break from writing.

I have to say I am very relieved to have finished. Once nano had ended i found it increasingly difficult to keep the momentum going despite the fact that i only had 3 chapters to write after the end of nano. This normally would have taken me 3 days and no more than a week, but for some reason i found it incredibly difficult to write. It wasn't so much because i did not know what to write, because i did but i just couldn't sit down and do it. I had lost my motivation.

I was talking to my sister yesterday, who is unemployed as a result of government cuts brought on by the financial crisis. She is very depressed about it and I am trying to help her by giving her something to focus on each day, and knowing that she is a fan of the Twilight Saga and a reader of fanfiction, I suggested that she write her own story. My sister is not a writer and creator of stories as i am but she is a good poet, she told me she would not know what to write about. I am not very familliar with twilight- haven't read or seen and don't intend to (not into vampires or werewolfs at all)- I asked her to imagine that two of the characters were in the back of my car right at that moment and i asked her to think about what they would talk about. We had a short discussion about it and upon my return i decided to try out my own advice in a roundabout way and wrote a letter to my MC. It really helped me and i think i may have been suffering from a mild case of writers block. Nevertheless that block has now been lifted and today I wrote the last two chapters without any problems.

As a result of the completion of this draft I shall be updating my blog over the next few days, but i do intend to keep this going. I have another idea for a novel which has been bubbling under since mid nano and I intend to write that, and then go back and edit 'The stepmother'. I will use this blog to continue to show my daily trials with writing and documenting my efforts where possible.

So I succeeded...

Hey readers, it's me I am back for good as Take That once sang. This last month has been tricky and I found it next to impossible to keep my blog and novel for Nano going at the same time, and as a result the blog suffered. On a more positive note I did manage to hit my 50,000 words for Nano and am officially a winner (Yay!) I do still have some work to do and have three more chapters to write but the end is certainly near and this makes me so very happy.

The problem I have now is motivating myself to write those last three chapters to finish, now that nano has finished the pressure has been relieved and as a result I haven't finished like I should have done, and this is something I seriously need to get on and do, especially as I know I will feel so much better when it is done. Strangely enough the next few chapters should be some of the easiest to write and I have them planned out in detail in my head. I just have to sit down and convince myself to do it.

I actually have quite a busy weekend ahead of me, I am out all day tomorrow, I am out tomorrow night, working saturday, and then out saturday night so I do have limited time available, but I shall persevere and get this novel finished if it kills me.

On a slightly different subject, I understand that Amanda Vickery's series on the Georgians began tonight although unfortunately I missed it. I hope to watch this over the next few days and once I have I will post a review for it.

Will be in touch soon xxx

Invasion of the literary kind

So I have hit just over 20k on my first week of Nano and am quite rightly over the moon about it, but something terrible has happened. An idea for a second novel, a fantasy novel, has popped into my head and I have been faced with the most awful dilemma. What should I do about it?

I have written down the idea and made some notes on character names and places but thats about it... well actually it isn't whilst sat at work the other day I wrote the first chapter/ prologue. Unfortunately we are losing our external email and internet access at work tomorrow so I had to email my writing to myself so that I did not lose it. Knowing as I did that it might distract me from the novel i am writing for Nanowrimo I composed a letter to myself for the email attached to the file and I thought I would post it here as it's quite funny:

This is the excerpt you wrote on that lunch the other day- hopefully by the time you've read this you will have completed the final 1300 words for today, if not no chocolate for you tonight!!!!

You are not allowed to open this until you finish novel one- do not even think about it even though you want to- I know you are thinking about it now so Stop it Stop it stop it!

You will never be able to finish 1 if 2 is in your head

PS novel 2 can be commenced in approx 2 weeks if you get your act together!!!

BTW I did complete the final 1300 words if you were wondering and the chocolate was eaten.

One week in...

Ok so, I am one week in and I have already committed mass murder by killing of three people no less, two of which were... children! so not only am I a mass murderer but I am also a child killer, and there is more death to come.

It has been a difficult week and an exhausting week. This was my first full week at work and my first attempt at writing 3k words a day and it was hard, challenging but also fun and rewarding. 3k may seem quite a high target when the minimum you can do for nano each day to hit your target is 1667, but I write regularly anyway and whilst I could have done the 1667, I prefer to write in chapters and have been aiming to do a chapter a day, and for me a chapter works out at 3-5 scenes at around 3k words in total.

Throughout the week my preferred method of writing was doing approx 1-1500 words before work and then the rest after work,or alternatively writing on my lunch hour, when i could not write before work. I was surprised by exactly how well I committed myself to the task in hand despite the many committments i had outside work. When I think about it I know that I worked 35 hours had 5 hours worth of work lunches the last two of which i wrote in, I also had guiding and also dance classes and yet I managed to schedule in enough hours to do my nanowrimo.

As the week wore on it did get more and more difficult to write, but for me this was because I was exhausted and ran out of steam. Yesterday was a bad day for me. I did not write before work, I then managed only 500 words on my lunch hour which i knew were dreadful and I had written 1000 only the day before in the same time of approximately 30 mins after i had done all my other tasks i do at lunch like eating and so on. When I got home I could not motivate myself to write 2500 words, I was too tired and i knew that what i had already done was nowhere near good enough. Holes had started appearing in my research and I had no names for the minor charactors who were new to my plot, I could not even come up with names for them off the top of my head.

I had to take a break from nano, even if it was for one night only. I went onto our Nano region chatroom but word sprints were going on and it just made me feel worse than I already did. so I logged out of the forums and the chatrooms had a few games of solitaire and spider solitaire,turned off my computer and went to bed. As a result I woke up feeling much better, and even more beneficial to me, my main characters inner voice had returned. She had gone on a days holiday on friday but now she was back and she was talking to me and telling me her story once more. In the three hours that we had in our Nanowrimo meet up for our region in gloucester I wrote 2000 words despite being surrounded by distractions of children, a very busy coffee shop and also the alarms on the coffee machines. I was really pleased with myself and this evening I easily completed my last 1000 words. Yes its true that I am still technically 3000 words behind where i ideally wanted to be, but I don't care and I am still going to make it. Besides I may still catch up anyway.

so 6 days in 15500 words down and 34500 words to go approx. Yay!!!

Honesty is the best policy

Just wanted to give you an update on my Nano progress. To date i am just short of 10k and doing well so far. One of my main problems at the moment is that I am spending all my writing time on my Nano and so i know my blog is suffering for which i apologise. I think if it wasn't for the fact that i work full time and am doing funny hours this week it wouldn't be so bad, but it is the way it is and what i've been doing is an hour before work in the mornings and then an hour or two until i hit my 3k target in the evenings starting at ten pm.

So sorry if i have been neglecting you but I am updating my twitter page with my progress too and twitter updates appear to the right hand side of this page so as long as i've updated for the day I have an excuse.

Whilst nano is on my blog posts will inevitably be more infrequent however I will do a minimum of 2 blog posts a week to keep you updated.

To all the other Nano participants this year good luck to you.

_________________________

9119/50000 words

and the race is on for me vs me: NANOWRIMO Day 1

This is a very short post as it has been a very long day.

I stayed up to midnight on the 31st October and I wrote 1k words and upon return from guiding tonight (and after work) I wrote another 2k although I cannot post this on the NANOWRIMO sight as it has been up and down like a yoyo today.

With 3k done I am officially cream crackered and looking forward to sleeping in 30secs time. Todays chapter was also difficult but the characters voice (its a first person point of view) seems to have got louder in my head and I feel like she is telling me her story and I am just writing it down and not so much the creator.

Fingers crossed this continues, and I will try and get a word count tracker for on here to show my progress tomorrow but for now....

1 day down 3k written and 47k to go so thats 3000/50000