Day 22. Farmville single-handedly destroys my efforts to get ahead again. 35,229.

Day 23. Fishville also strikes and I hit a maaaajooorrr wall. I cannot see what more I can do with the story given my cock-up earlier in the month. I force the words out but have absolutely no idea where I’m going to get the remaining 12,994 words from. Sob.

Day 24. Wait a minute. 13,000 words is about the length of my dissertation. That’s what I’ll do! I’ll draft a dissertation, and I can just put the words in the mouth of a wise village elder who has a strangely large amount of knowledge about the entire Aegean. Bingo! 2998 words spill forth. Some of them are ok.

Day 25. Out at gig. Not a single word written all day. Oops. Still, I’m at 40,004 and that’s an achievement in itself.

Day 26. OK, the dissertation is fine, but after yesterday, something drastic has to be done. I get the short story I wrote earlier in the month and sneakily copy it in. Oh look! I’ve recouped an entire day! Then I also write 1600 words. I am ahead.

Day 27. 1700 words but I’m flagging. I write with too few words. 45,117.

Day 28. 1566 words. Steady, girl. Steady.

Day 29. OK, where are those 100 word stories I wrote earlier in the month? They’re going in too. What? It’s creative writing, isn’t it? 48430 and OMG one day left. Cutting it fine.

Day 30. For the last day, I feel it appropriate to return to my actual plot. 500 words at lunchtime, and the remaining 1074 after work. And then I gain a miraculous 100 words in the verifier.

In sum:

Yes. Bring it. Now I can actually do some knitting! Woo!

Day 15. Half-way! Binge on crafts during the day, and hit 25,440 words in the evening. Boyfriend is coughing. This may spell trouble.

Day 16. Now I’m coughing. Spend day sprawled in front of daytime TV. Binge on Star Trek gives me no useful ideas. Hack out a guiltily small 745 words.

Day 17. Feel terrible. Star Trek completely destroys my grip on the past, though I do manage a fabulous dye job on some laceweight. Apparently managed more words than I thought, as I’m less than a day behind on 27,189.

Day 18. Gain a bonus evening due to postponement of a trip darn sarf and drag out 2,637 words from somewhere. I’ll have plenty of time over the next couple of days to get back on target.

Days 19 & 20. BLARGH. Write nothing. Spend much time shivering through 6 layers of clothing, and proclaiming everything in the Tate Modern to be bollocks.

Day 21. Aha! It’s alive! Largely recovered from illness and spew my highest daily wordcount yet (3525 words) in my attempt to catch back up. Most of it is tat. My characters happily set fire to something which bears a striking resemblance to something seen in the Tate Modern. 33,351 words leaves me a day behind schedule.

In sum. Not an enjoyable week. Came close to ditching the whole thing once, during a particularly grumpy (and paranoid) moment on Friday. Suppressed for now, but the longer I stay behind, the more words I need to pull out each day to catch up. Yikes.

Day 8. 14671 words. Longer than my dissertation. An amusingly ham-fisted attempt at creating some sexual tension. I fear that the inevitable descent into smut is beginning rather earlier than I would have liked, but successfully distract the naughtiness with some bloody slaughter.

Day 9. Ooouuuch. Mondays kill writing. I know there is a Bigger Story here but I cannot find it. I feel like I am painstakingly removing the day’s 1694 words from my brain with a mustard spoon. One at a time. Through my eyeballs.

Day 10. EUREKA! Said Bigger Story comes to me in a flash of ghosts and skeletons. Lose the evening to Muse at the NIA (which was, as usual, epic on a stick) but knock out a few words at lunchtime and just squeeze past the target in the last thirteen minutes of the day. 16728.

Day 11. Halp. Today brings the opposite problem to Monday. So many threads and themes and words wanting out that I can’t decide where to start. Have an easy time getting to 18455 and pause for some light fibre artistry.

Day 12. I break 20 thou. :-O woah. That’s a lot of words. My story becomes unintentionally comic as I bring the gods into it and they start acting the fool. I can tone down the campness later, right?

Day 13. I use the phrase ‘his/her body was wracked with heaving sobs’ at least twice today. Might change one of them but I suppose I can edit them further away from each other. Also I seem to have used up all my new plot already. Oops.

Day 14. Don’t feel like writing at all, until DG starts playing Gears of War 2. I decide to take my prompts from that. I end up with an epic scene involving mutant birds, skeletal warriors and rivers of flame. Nice. 23,793 words and it’s flowing beautifully.

In sum. You know, I think I might manage this. Half way through both time and words, and feeling good. Hurrah!

It’s like writing my dissertation all over again. Only the dissertation was completely re-written and edited in the same time period. This ain’t so hard, in comparison.

Here’s a little run-down of my writing week.

Day 0. I realise the main premise of my plot is untenable. I scrap it, but the loss of that brings the opportunity of an interesting relationship between two of my main characters. I sleep.

Day 1. I have gotten off to a flying start. 3318 words in four sessions of about an hour each. The inspiration that has been building flies out of me. Goats feature heavily. I dislike quite a lot of what I have written, but am virtuous and do not delete.

Day 2. Realise I have already shot my goat load, as it were. Force words out one at a time. Not pretty. Eke myself to 4935 words, which is enough to take me into the next day.

Day 3. Unexpected pub trip delays start of writing. After our return, one of my characters sits down and refuses to do any more until I acknowledge that he is ginger. I shrug, and amend his description a few lines above. Suddenly, I am on 6376 words, and my previous male lead is sulking.

Day 4. Words spill out of me, both before work, and when I return. Mr I-wanna-be-a-ginge is so rude and blasphemous he is an absolute pleasure to write. 8425 words.

Day 5. Fireworks (and wine) obliterate the evening’s writing potential. However, got a few hundred in at lunchtime so end the day on 8791.

Day 6. Snatched a few words before another outing distracts me. 9587, some way short of the projected word count. While out, am struck by inspiration for a singularly morbid short story and briefly flirt with including it in my wordcount. I am accused of cheating on my novel, and shamed into removing it. I am keeping those 1,500 words close at hand in case I am desperate at the end of the month. It’s in the rules, I don’t care what you say *shakes fist*.

Day 7. An epic day, despite the wine literary efforts of the night before leaving me drained and unable to rise before noon. Am sure I’m doing a grave disservice to the geography of eastern Europe but if I check it on the internets I will be distracted by shiny. I end the day on 12488 words, 25% of the way through, and well on track for a win.

In sum. I am still having fun. Not having any idea where my plot is going seems quite valuable in terms of the freedom it gives me to just vomit out words into a random scene. Also, the whole thing seems to be getting more violent and bloody by the minute. This is absolutely fine by me. I’ll take black blood and oozing wounds over character pieces any day.

And so, in the words of Fable II, our story begins.

It’s nice that the first day of my first NaNoWriMo has fallen on a weekend. A full day of preparation, then a full day for writing, and a chance to get ahead of schedule in the first flush of inspiration.

I was considering throwing down a few words at the stroke of midnight, but instead, hit by a sudden waft of perfume from my Muse, revised my plot in a fairly dramatic way and immediately went to bed. I didn’t dream of my book. I wonder if I will. I would rather like to. It seems like it would be an interesting way to develop the story if I lack inspiration one day.

Anyway, I have begun. 3318 words so far, roughly four hours work and about 6% of my total. I even allowed myself a reasonable amount of editing, so I don’t hate everything I’ve done so far. But I’m not allowed to read it now I’ve had a glass of wine. My self-critic is a harsh bitch when I’m tipsy.

If you want to keep an eye on my progress, you can do so here. Once they turn the widgets on (or just fix them) I will lodge one over there on the right hand side of the page. I am accountable to everyone. If I am lagging, do not let me get away with it.

… it’s for a good cause.

I knit. I crochet. Sometimes I dye yarn. But spinning always seemed to be going just that bit too far. There are perfectly good machines to do that, I said, which are far more efficient and reliable than some bint with a bit of wood.

I still believe this.

But my NaNo is set in the ancient Mediterranean. It’s pretty hard to image a female character – in fact any character, without knowing what they would have been making or wearing. I was researching such matters when I came across this:

Lekythos by the Amasis Painter

And that was it. I decided to give it a bash. So I bought a bottom-whorl drop spindle and a lump o’ roving, and spun some yarn:

It’s pretty cool to think that I’m doing something that women have been doing for thousands of years. I like to think that all of them swore as much as I did on their first try as well. And I am so going to adopt the fleece-on-a-stick-like-candyfloss method once I’ve got my technique down.

Bad planning on their part, really. They should have put at least a month in between the two for respective recovery and preparation. It’s hard to pull a blog post out of your arse when you’re too busy researching the harvesting season of chickpeas.

Yes, I’ve decided I am doing NaNoWriMo (thanks for the encouragement!). I have a vague plot, some characters, and a setting. I’ve spent the last few days doing some ‘research’, mostly from wikipedia (it’s a novel, it doesn’t have to be that accurate, right?). I’ve made vast lists of questions that I need to answer before I can write, or while writing. I have trawled the internet for pictures related to my topic (my desktop now cycles through them to be a constant source of inspiration). I feel – almost – prepared.

However I am a teensy bit terrified. In a perfect November, I would aim for 1667 words a day. I’m already losing at least five evenings to already-planned events, so that brings it up to 2000 words immediately. Factor in my notorious inability to stick to *anything* for that long and I’m going to have to write 10,000 words a day for the five days I manage to do any writing at all. While probably being completely dissatisfied and disheartened by the entire thing because I am not allowed to edit.

However, fear not – I’m not disheartened yet. How can I be disheartened with all these pictures of goats on my desktop?

Just thought I’d share a tip I heard a while ago, and a resultant lightbulb moment.

When chopping vegetables, save the offcuts and peelings in a plastic bag in the freezer for future stock-making. It saves you using fresh new veg just for boiling, and reduces the amount of chopping you have to do. Sure, the compost heap suffers a bit, but as we can’t get into ours anyway I’m willing to take that hit.

Just the other day I used my bag of frozen offcuts and a chicken carcass to make some awesome stock. Now this was good, and I felt thrifty enough, until I suddenly thought hey, I have stock simmering, why not make risotto the way they always tell you to.

BING.

I have never seen a recipe suggesting this before. Recipes for risotto often say ‘have a pot of stock simmering’ but no recipe for stock ever says ‘Making stock? Why not use some of it as it’s simmering to make risotto for that evening’s dinner.’ Outrageous.

For each cup of stock I removed, I added one of water back in. Because it was still simmering, it continued to take up flavour from the kitchenkill and so I still had enough left for an entire ice-cube-bag of stock for future use. Not only that, but because the carcass was from a whole chicken I’d jointed myself, there was loads of meat left on it to shred back into the risotto. In fact, there was not a single item of non-waste-food used – the bacon was on its last legs and even the rice was a bag of pudding rice that had been sitting in the back of a cupboard for a year and given one last chance to prove itself useful.

I can’t say I had as much fun the other day, having cold polenta and chilli for breakfast. But the layer of thrifty smugness (and bacon) definitely made it and my day more palatable.

I’ve just learned of the existence of National Novel Writing Month. Basically, you take November to spaff out 50,000 words, and ba-baaa! You have a draft for a novel. This, as I tweeted earlier, interests me.

Like billions of other kids before me, I wanted to be a writer. I had folders full of stories. I wrote science fiction, I wrote Mills & Boon, I wrote some alarmingly violent horror. Then one day, there came that ‘careers’ day. Careers days were excellent for those of my classmates who knew from the age of five that they wanted to be a vet. They could be pointed towards the right A-levels, pointed towards the right work experience, and were generally a joy to assist. I, apparently, was not. We were told to write down a list of five jobs we would like to do. Three of mine were writer, fashion designer, and astrophysicist. I think I was asked what I wanted to write about. I didn’t know. And that was the end of it. Barely anyone makes it as a novelist. And journalism is really hard to get into. Might as well give up now.

I’m not trying to say I HAVE ALWAY WONTED 2 B A RITER AND THEY TRAMPLD ON MAI DREEMS but come on. They didn’t even try. I would try so hard to think of things I could see myself doing and every time it was greeted by ‘you can’t do that’ and no alternatives. I am so jealous of people who know what they want to do with their lives. You do not know how easy you have it.

Anyway, bitterness aside, I have several novels in me. They try to come out sometimes, before paranoia and self-doubt beat them back into submission. I get an idea. I ponder excitedly, thinking of what I can do with it. Then I do a little research, realise how little I know about the subject. I don’t want to look stupid. Then I start to wonder if anyone else has come up with the idea, and I’ve just not read it. How bad would that be? Unintentional plagiarism doesn’t look like that from the outside. And, if something has already been written, how arrogant is it to think that I could write anything better?

This is why NaNoWriMo seems like a good idea. There are no rules. Just get the words out of you. It doesn’t matter how good it is, just that it is. After that, the only way is up.

And there are signs. I have conveniently discovered its existence just before the relevant month. As I was sat wondering if it would be a good thing to do, a new concept and proto-plot popped into my mind from nowhere. As I was adding the NaNoWriMo link to the top of the page, the http text appeared in the ‘enter link here’ box before I’d even typed it.

So I’m tempted. I have nine days to decide if my idea can be expanded into a full novel with interesting characters and plot devices that would make Aristotle proud. What do you think I should do?

Done and done. Now to feed it whisky for the next 2 months.

Oh is that teasing? OK. Here’s a cake shot too.

Cor blimey look at the raisins on that. Etc.