My latest novel manuscript is off to a flying start thanks to National Novel Writing Month. I am 50,963 words in, about halfway through. I really enjoy the story I am writing, although my characters are not. The five of them are in a precarious situation with absolutely no idea what is happening. They have theories, but none of them is close. I am looking forward to springing the big revelation on them.

This was the third time I had done NaNoWriMo, and it was the hardest. There was no novelty thrill. This time, I did not reach 50,000 words until the final day. My long-term illness was up and about for just about the whole month, and the medication I take for it tires me. The illness also made it uncomfortable to sit for extended periods. I wrote in blocks of 300-500 words and then had a break and did something else for half an hour or so. I wrote well into the evening on most days to pass the daily average of 1667 words.

I did this NaNoWriMo primarily to increase my output and dedication to writing. This it has done. I now spend a lot more time thinking about my writing, often stopping what I am doing to write down notes. This morning, I even thought up some ideas while swimming that I had to remember until I finally finished my laps to write them down. Until this morning, I had been very good at avoiding thinking about writing while swimming for fear of forgetting killer ideas by the time I had finished.

It will be interesting to see how much I write this month. I have a new article for Divine to write this week that requires a lot of research, and I now have nearly three months of newspapers stacked up to read. Lots of ideas for Divine articles come out of the newspapers, and I believe writers must keep themselves informed, so there is no way I am throwing them out until they have been thoroughly scoured. But while catching up on reading them and writing more articles for Divine, I hope to write at least 15,000 words of my novel this month.

I have been too busy writing to blog lately. I am currently doing National Novel Writing Month. The aim is to write 50,000 words for the month. As of a few moments ago, I have written 1826 words for the day, which betters the daily target of 1667 words. My best daily total is 2430 words. All up, I have written 37345 words, so I am currently 2345 words ahead of schedule. But I need to get further ahead as next week I have a few days where my available writing time will be reduced, and I won’t be writing at all on Saturday week because of an all-day and late into the night job as a polling assistant.

I am very much enjoying the science fiction young adult story I am writing. The novel can easily be divided into five parts, and I am just at the end of part two, which suggests it will be about 90,000 words. It’s a bit shorter than my other drafts of novels.

I do worry about a few things. Do I have too much dialogue? Recently, I have begun to include short past tense (the novel is written in present tense) summaries of what the four main characters say and decide to do.

I also worry about the amount of swearing I have included. When I was a kid, we swore our heads off, but I have a feeling I will be cutting down on the swearing when I edit it.

Another worry comes from the novel being in first person and the one character’s POV. Everything is described from an 18-year-old’s limited knowledge of the world and its people. So sometimes his descriptions and conclusions are dead wrong. I worry that readers might say that something is wrong and think the author should have checked his facts rather than the reader knowing that it is just the character who is wrong.

The last point makes the writing easier in some ways because I don’t have to fact-check everything my character says. If he thinks the moon might be more prominent in the northern hemisphere, then that is what he thinks. I don’t need to bother to check whether he is right.

Anyway, I must get back to writing and see if I can beat my best daily total so far.

This is my first blog post in over two weeks. I have been too busy writing fiction to blog. I am doing National Novel Writing Month and have written 18,544 words for a new novel over the past 12 days. The aim is to write 50,000 words by the end of the month, an average of 1667 words a day. So far, I have made that average on ten of the twelve days, with my daily totals varying from 1303 to 1887 words.

I have done NaNoWriMo twice before. This time, it is a lot harder due to tiredness caused by the medication I am taking for my ulcerative colitis. The crappy disease became active again about six weeks ago. It appeared to go away for about a week, but it returned. I am tired, so I need to get ahead with my writing because things happening at the end of the month will eat into writing time (assuming my UC disappears). I am only 111 words ahead of schedule.

But the tiredness has not wrecked my reawakened enthusiasm for writing, which is my main reason for doing NaNoWriMo. I find myself thinking about the novel all the time: while watching the news, while walking, while people are talking to me. It’s a half-hour walk to town, and I have spent much of that time scribbling notes on a pad. On many days, I go for a walk before writing, so when I get home and turn on the computer, my character’s thoughts and actions are raring to flow.

So it’s a battle between enthusiasm and tiredness; hopefully, the former wins. 

I have decided to do National Novel Writing Month once more. I successfully completed it in 2011 and 2012. The aim of NaNoWriMo is for a writer to write a 50,000-word novel in November. My main reason for doing NaNoWriMo again is to motivate myself. Apart from the actual month, I know from previous years that my writing output is greater in the months after NaNoWriMo.

What Will I Write?

I intend to resurrect one of the stories I started writing during my Master of Creative Writing. One is a young adult novel, Branded. I wrote the first two chapters of it for a Writing for Young Adults subject. It is a different take on alien abduction as it is more about the actual abduction and trying to escape than the aftermath. The other manuscript is based on a short story I submitted to a publisher during the course called Me, Arizona and the Spike. The story is about the transition of humanity during the technological singularity.  I started to expand that short story into a novel during a vacation break in my masters, writing the first 10,000 words.

Until I started writing this blog post, I was committed to the technology singularity novel. But having just remembered how enthusiastically the lecturer responded to Branded, I am seriously considering returning to it. It has a lot clearer, at least in my head, journey to travel, than the adult novel. I have no idea where Me, Arizona and the Spike will go, let alone finish.

Critics of NaNoWriMo

NaNoWriMo has its critics. They say it is just about quantity and not quality, which is true, but that is where editing and redrafting come in. They also say that 50,000 words does not make a novel. The typical adult novel is over 80,000 words. But young adult novels can be around 50,000 words, which is another reason to choose to write Branded (but from previous experience it will probably run well over 100,000 words).

The novel I started in the 2011 NaNoWriMo ended at over 200,000 words. One of my NaNoWriMo buddies plans to write some short stories and articles for his 50,000 words. There is no need to be pedantic about writing a 50,000 word novel.

As I finish this post, I am drifting towards writing the young adult novel. If I choose it, I might actually finish the first draft of a novel in November. That would be fantastic. It also has the advantage of being fantasy/science fiction, so it will involve little research as I can invent much of the world it is set in. I have found in previous NaNoWriMos that research can get in the way of writing 1666 words a day. But, if research is skipped it can lead to doubts over potential plot holes.

You can join me by becoming my buddy.