Hello from November. It’s official – spring is here and the days are longer and warmer in Cape Town. Hooray. I find it much easier to be cheerful when the sun is out.
As a challenge to myself, I have signed up to participate in this year’s National Novel Writing Month (#NaNoWriMo). I’d started NaNoWriMos before, I think (I have an account, but can’t remember what I’d planned to start writing) but never finished them (as is evident from my patchy memory about what I was planning to do).
For the uninitiated, the goal of NaNoWriMo is to write every day for the whole of November. Each day you’re aiming to write a minimum of 1665 words, so that after the 30 days you have at least 50 000 words. That is a big chunk of a writing project to get done in such a short space of time (for comparison, the first Harry Potter book was 76 944 words according to the internet).
I’m working on a new novel, tentatively called New Moms. I started last week by filling in my character questionnaire (more on this soon!) for the four characters that I have in mind, and started writing yesterday.
I’m sharing my journey as I write via my Instagram page and I’ll also be sharing it here via my projects page. Hopefully I’ll make it. Hopefully this little blog post committing myself to doing it will help that happen. Hold fingers and thumbs and toes for me.
Have you completed a NaNoWriMo before? How did it go for you? I’d love to hear about it.
Jen Thorpe 