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the finish line
NaNoWriMo ended yesterday, and I passed the finish line by writing 50,000 words in a month. I’m pleased that I hit the goal, and the challenge highlighted the fact that there is always time to write if I cut back on the time-wasting activities and ensure that writing is a priority. One of the problems I encountered with keeping to the schedule was a creeping sense of boredom began to pervade my day. I realised that I had to introduce some variety into my schedule, and having the same writing time every day just doesn’t suit my temperament. An interesting side-effect is that I hardly drank any alcohol during November…
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winter morning
For a dog that’s camera-shy – Minnie hates me taking her photo – she’s beginning to creep her way into a lot of my nature shots lately. I don’t mind as it often adds a spot of interest to the image. As you can see it’s cold today with wintery fog. I won’t say anything else about that image because it’s doing all the heavy-lifting. I’ve been churning away at the novel, and it’s over the 30K mark now. I had a couple of missed days for a variety of reasons but I’m in the swing of things now. I need to be because I have WexWorlds this weekend. I…
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accumulating words
I took the above photo over a month ago, when we still had lush grass, and rainfall was gentle, not violent. We had a bad storm yesterday, which has left me with poor Internet access and no television reception (I get it from satellite, and the dish appears to have become mis-aligned from the winds). My Internet connection will not be restored properly until Monday, and the engineer will not be here until Thursday to fix the telly. All of this bodes well for my novel writing, but not so great for my sanity, since I live a rather hermit-like existence on weekdays anyway. I’ve already been strict about cutting…
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NaNoWriMo Go
November 1st has rolled around in Ireland and weather-wise it’s right on season: wet, windy and grey. Some of the trees are already stripped of leaves, while others are hanging on to their cover. On my drive to the woods there is a section on the last elbow of road that has a complete avenue of native, mature deciduous trees. Their branches create a canopy over my car as I pass under them. During the summer it’s a glowing green roof, and during the autumn it’s a russet net that shakes shining, wet gold leaves upon the path. It’s like goldfish drifting down to swim in the road flooded with their brethren.…
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NaNoWriMo 2010
NaNoWriMo is approaching. For those not in the know, this stands for National Novel Writing Month. Although, as Martin pointed out, it would probably be more accurate to call it International Novel Writing Month, since people participate from all over the globe. The idea is simple: it’s a collective push by writers to commit 50,000 words to paper/hard drive during the 30 days of November. That’s about 3/4 of the words necessary for a standard novel – well, depending on the genre. NaNoWriMo is about writing a fast first draft without over-analysing the quality. This is a system that works well since a lot of the fine work occurs in the…
