Say what now? Have I finally gone crazy and started spouting nonsense ( more than usual ).
No, NaNoWriMo stands for National Novel Writing Month and once I explain maybe you will think I have gone mad, but first a quick medical update.
Things have gone well this week and I have been able to log on to work as normal and even visited the office yesterday. I've started a slow taper of my prednisolone steroids and currently on 5mg one day and 2.5mg the next. So far so good.
Also my nausea caused by taking itraconazole seems to have eased so maybe it was because my ciclosporin levels were a bit high before.
NaNoWriMo
So
NaNoWriMo or NAtional NOvel WRIting MOnth. Well you can read the details
on their site but here's the gist of it...
National Novel Writing Month is a fun, seat-of-your-pants approach to novel writing. Participants begin writing November 1. The goal is to write a 175-page (50,000-word) novel by midnight, November 30.
Valuing enthusiasm and perseverance over painstaking craft, NaNoWriMo is a novel-writing program for everyone who has thought fleetingly about writing a novel but has been scared away by the time and effort involved.
Because of the limited writing window, the ONLY thing that matters in NaNoWriMo is output. It's all about quantity, not quality. The kamikaze approach forces you to lower your expectations, take risks, and write on the fly.
Make no mistake: You will be writing a lot of crap. And that's a good thing. By forcing yourself to write so intensely, you are giving yourself permission to make mistakes. To forgo the endless tweaking and editing and just create. To build without tearing down.......
This is the tenth year of NaNoWriMo and in 2007 over 100,000 people took part and 15,000 people completed it.
I actually tried NaNoWriMo back in 2003 but as I had just started my full-time post grad at the
TIC I didn't do so well. My issue was not the number of words ( that is never a problem ) but being able to complete the story in time from beginning through the middle to the end.
I've come close to trying again before and this year I have taken the plunge. This time though I have started to fully plot out my story and the characters backgrounds, this is all allowed in the rules as long as you don't start to write the actual story prose before 1st November.
I'm also hoping to get along to some of the face to face meets of NaNoWriMoers that are being organised in Birmingham at one of my favourite coffee shops, the
Coffee Lounge Navigation Street.
So what's my book going to be about? Well the general consensus is that whilst it is a good idea to publicly announce you are entering NaNoWriMo ( no backing out now ) the text you write etc. is best kept private apart from the basic details.
My idea is for a darkly comic novel set on a desert island. Think Lost meets Lord of the Flies meets a teen slasher film but with forty-year old protagonists.
All this means I prolly won't be blogging that much during November but I'll try to do a least a quick health bulletin and the occasional progress report. I'll also be tweeting progress as I go, check out the tweet feed on the left of your screen or follow me via my
twitter feed.
Wish me luck!
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