Category: NaNoWriMo

January

January is not going to plan.  Usually, it is a great writing month but this year I am in a heightened state of procrastination so epic that house cleaning has actually occurred.  It’s not good.  Not good at all.

Of course, there is still all the cat stuff going on, not to mention parenting through the teen angst, which is hard as I feel like a thirteen year old myself a lot of the time. I still cannot type the without typing teh.  Why did I think 2014 was going to be any different?  It’s not like all the crap wipes itself out on 31st December and life resets itself to a perfect state at 12.01 a.m. on January 1st.

My procrastinatory tendencies are driving me madder than usual because I have the perfect motivation to write. I have a load of half finished stuff courtesy of NaNoWriMo and Writing Events Bath workshops, plus I have been placed first in a short story competition! Details to follow.

 

 

Still going

Still going steadily on NaNoWriMo although I haven’t made it to any of the local meets and I did collide with a writer’s block yesterday.  However, armed with advice from one of the many useful NaNo tips I receive via email and twitter, I karate chopped it into tiny pieces and fed it to my pet dragon.

I’m over 35,000 words and still, miraculously, have more to say.

Strangely, while I have been mostly directing my energy into this project,  two other happy writing things are also going on.

I’ve been attending a weekly writer’s workshop with Writing Events Bath.  As in the town Bath Spa, not the tub for washing oneself.  I arranged this as an intervention against myself.  I needed to get out there talking to people who are going through the same things re writing, but mainly to get over the dread of reading one’s own work out loud to other people and taking feedback.  Two weeks in and that’s already getting easier.

The other great thing is that one of the flash fictions I entered into the Inktears Flash Fiction comp earlier this year (after my prolonged writing drought), was highly commended and will be published on that website in 2014.  More news from Inktears coming soon…

All this makes it sound like I have given up on procrastinating.  Don’t worry, I am still doing plenty of it, mainly around domestic cleansing type tasks.  Why is white generally considered the most appropriate colour for sanitary ware?  I suggest a sludgy shade of dust might be the way to go.

 

NaNoWriMo Here I Come

“In the absence of clearly defined goals, we become strangely loyal to performing daily acts of trivia.” ~ Anon

That sums up my life up in a sentence.

In light of this, and also a little slogan I spotted elsewhere – if you do nothing, you get nothing – I have signed up for this year’s NaNoWriMo – National Novel Writing Month.

50,000 words in 30 days. What have I done?

I’ve been circling NaNoWriMo for years, always with the same novel in mind – one that started out as a children’s book and has developed into a YA novel as my offspring have aged. I’m talking like it’s a physical thing, this book, but of course, it’s all still in my head.

I’ve always stalled when it’s come to NaNoWriMo, telling myself November is a really busy month. It will be this year, too. However, life just keeps getting more complicated, time allotted to writing gets swallowed up by other things and this book isn’t getting written. So, I’ve decided to go for it.

Maybe it will turn out to be the basis of something proper and real, maybe the process will just get the story out of my head and allow room for something else to move in there.

I will have to quash my inner rigorous self-editor and stare down the anti-writing gremlins. I’ll have to stick my fingers in my ears and eyes and sing la-la-la very loudly at all those writers who are signed up to write two or more times this word count… It’s that book shop scenario all over again.