As you may be aware if you follow this blog, I have previously attempted NaNoWriMo… successfully once and DD succeeded where I fell by the wayside another time. In fact, she then went on to also complete her target the following year and, after a year off, is going for it again this year with a target of 24k words. Not bad for an 11 year old! Puffs up with motherly pride.
Welcome to the Solstice (Litha) edition of the Tarot Blog Hop. I haven’t participated in the last couple, but it’s nice to be back. You can find links to the previous and next posts in the Hop at the bottom of this page, along with a link to the Master list in case of any broken links.
I must admit that I struggled somewhat with the broadness of the topic (though mostly with all the references to “faeries”), the main theme of which was to share a gift or talent with the circle. I’m afraid that I suffer from a rather British reticence about blowing my own trumpet in any sort of blatant way. Our overseas cousins have never seemed to be afflicted by this malaise and are quite happy to blithely puff away, but over here, we tend to find that kind of thing faintly unseemly and embarrassing, albeit increasingly less so these days based on the wannabe culture of X-factor and the myriad of other such shows. On this occasion, however, I have girded my loins, pulled up my big girl knickers, armed myself with cliches and set aside my reserve. I have emerged from beneath my bushel, blinking mole-like into the Solstice dawn. I have buffed up the brassware, taken a deep breath or three and am all set to blow like Gabriel. Ready?
Ok, so I’m no Dickens, but I am officially, as of last night 28th November, a bona fide novelist! See the badge? See it?–>
I won! I wrote 50,000 words in less than one month for NaNoWriMo. See me jumping up and down with excitement? Go me!
I won’t say it wasn’t hard work… umm… well, actually, it wasn’t hard work to be perfectly truthful. It was an enormous amount of fun and I enjoyed every minute of my fantasy world playing out its story in my head. Now, my head is often usually a jumble of half-baked, incomplete, bizarre and random bits so you won’t be surprised that the novel is in much the same shape at the moment. There is still a long way to go before it’s likely to be even remotely worth reading, but riding the crest of this incredible wave of achievement and momentum, I have every intention of completing the 75,000 words needed to make it novel sized, (and fill in the huge gaps still in the story). I am hoping that my fellow winners, Ali and Sara, will also persevere with their own great works (I have read excepts, trust me on this one). It has been good for me to have that element of challenge and mutual support. Long may it continue!
The trouble, I have discovered, with writing fictional characters is that they have a habit of trying to take over. Like Pinocchio, they all yearn to be real, to cut the strings by which you control them.
It starts off well enough, you write something to define who they are, what they look like, how they fit into the story and that’s straightforward enough. Great, you think, this is easy. So you sit down and write some dialogue for them and suddenly they are saying all sorts of things that never entered your head. You think, fine, enough dialogue, lets do some action, may be a description of what’s happening, a bit of ordinary stuff, scenery and that. Next thing you know, they are trying to muscle into the limelight and if that’s not enough, they have you writing all kinds of salacious and other nonsense. Then there are the characters that have no business being there at all and just wander in off the street for a look around before disappearing again.
Of course, it would make far more sense for me to be making a contribution to my NaNoWriMo word count, rather than this blog, but I thought you might be interested to hear how I’m getting on.
I started this report to find a bewildering array of numbers, so have decided to borrow from Hestia a rather more economical style of relaying the statistics.
Hallowe’en or Samhain marks the end of the old year (pagan style) and the start of the new. Whereas the start of the calendar year proper, i.e., January, is for me normally full of post-Chrimbo lethargy and the strong urge to hibernate until Spring, next month is going to be active to the point of insanity.
In addition to some tight deadlines for commissions, I start NaNoWriMo tomorrow (gulp). 50,000 words in 30 days is just short of 2000 words a day that I have to squeeze in to my already busy, family and work-filled life. Witchfest is coming up next Saturday and I’ll be reading Tarot all day, so that is one day less already. I must be insane!
On the plus side, the plot is coming together nicely, although I hope nobody overhead DH and I discussing the best way to murder someone in the pub yesterday 😀
Happy Hallowe’en /Samhain!
No, it isn’t the sound of a police car crashing. It’s the annually held National Novel Writing Month and I’ve signed up! Mind you, it may well end up being the sound of the ambulance bearing men in white coats coming to scrape up what is left of my sanity in December. OMG! What was I thinking? 50,000 words in 30 days is a totally mad idea.
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