On the 1st November, the 2015 writing challenge, the National Novel Writing Month, commences. It is a competition, a challenge to yourself when you try to complete 50,000 words of a new novel in the thirty days of November.
I thought about it for a couple of years before taking the plunge in 2013; that was the year I began to write a novel I had been thinking about, gestating, for many months and Nano was the spur to get me going. I wrote more than my target 50,000 and was on such a roll I carried on with the novel which became ‘Radwinter’. In 2014, I started to write the third part of what had become a Radwinter series, but what I am going to do in two weeks time when NaNoWriMo kicks off, I have no idea… well, actually I do have some inklings!
In between Novembers, there are many other activities, including writing camps… sadly these are not real camps with tents, fires and bedrolls, but virtual camps where you are allotted a ‘cabin’ with eleven other writers. The idea is that you support and encourage each other; however, there were only a couple of people in my cabin who properly joined in to support and encourage and engage with the others. Some never made contact at all, a couple joined but faded, one person was very outspoken and dominating then just vanished, and a couple were really helpful, friendly and great!
So November 2015… I have a few ideas… Another stalker story, maybe, – a stalker who is stalked but the identity of the stalker who narrates the novel is concealed… a completely new story, set in the present, partly based on something I wrote about fifteen years ago about a woman who decides to go back to her family from whom she has become estranged… an updated version of my great-grandparents’ love story…
I’ll have to wait for November 1st to see what happens!!
If you want to read Radwinter, or any of my other novels, here is a link:
Lois Elsden 