I’m busy writing; it’s my attempt at the 50,000 word writing challenge for the National Novel Writing Month. This time last year was the first time I had entered, and I wrote a story which had been ‘brewing’ for nearly a year since I had seen a sign to the village of Radwinter. The Radwinters in my novel became a family of four brothers, with their own complicated and not altogether happy life history; my story followed their Radwinter family history going back to 1841. This time last year, the story was almost writing itself…. and I completed the challenge and went on to finish and publish the book on Amazon.
In April this year there was another opportunity to challenge writers, this time the brief was more open and anything could be written or played about with, not just a novel… and as a result of that the second part of the Radwinter story was written… I hadn’t intended to write a sequel, I had never even considered it, but somehow the Radwinter family was unfinished… they had traced their paternal line, but what about their mother’s family, the Magicks… and so from that challenge Magick was written, and finally published in September.
That was really it with the family, I thought, the end… job done… except as I approached the novel-writing challenge this year and considered different ideas… I couldn’t help but consider the last remaining part of the story (well, I hope it’s the last part, I have other things to finish and write!!) This concerns the childhood of the narrator of the two books, Thomas… his way of dealing with unpleasant things is to forget them… but somehow he needs to challenge himself and reconcile himself to his own personal story.
So… back to the title of this post… as I lay in bed last night, as usual I was reviewing what I had written, thinking and planning… and I came to the conclusion that one of the characters I had written about… I had even got an image of the scene when he first arrives, just wasn’t necessary to the plot… and was a distraction,. I realised that for a reader, he would just be a short story-line which went nowhere, or if it did it would change the character of the book completely… but look, I’m talking about book… it isn’t even written yet! What is more, my challenge is to write 50,000 words and I’m considering deleting about a thousand of them to get rid of this character!
NaNo 2013… ‘Radwinter’:
CampNaNo 2014… ‘Magick’:
NaNo2014… ‘Raddy and Syl’, yet to be published!
Lois Elsden 
I think I’ll stick to doing crosswords.
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Probably best… you probably go to sleep at night not wondering about pretend people and why they are somewhere which is also pretend!
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Real people give me enough to ponder about without inventing new ones. Adam Smith said that our economy works because of everyone working in their own self-interest but I think it may have negative effects also. Life and people never cease to confound me. It’s a jungle out there as my Father used to say. Be prepared.
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I was a girl guide for a little while, so I’m always prepared! Did you ever watch Monty Python? ‘No-one expects the Spanish Inquisition!’
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I may have, can’t remember. The three things I hate about getting old is #1 you start losing your memory…………………. and I can’t remember #2 or #3
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Who did you say you were? 😉
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