Getting there!

In my earlier post today I mentioned the National Novel Writing Month, the online challenge to write 50,000 of a new novel in November.

I started on November 1st, and really struggled; I was sitting here in front of the computer, I had some ideas, I tried to write,and ground out about a thousand words… and really it was like drawing teeth! I couldn’t settle to one story and had a couple of false starts… The first was the idea of a stalker being stalked… a group of friends, on of whom is stalking a young man, a man young enough to be her son. However, the identity of the stalker is concealed and all the reader knows is it is one of the group… I had quite a few ideas on this but it just wasn’t flowing or coming together.

I tried to write another story along side this; although a completely new story, as required for the challenge, the actual idea wasn’t new. A very long time ago I had written a novel about a woman returning to her family home after a traumatic incident, only to find that a series of rather unpleasant accidents happen… I guess I will complete this new version, but again, in those first few days of November I just couldn’t get into it. I don’t think I was helped by a friend commenting on my descriptions of both my stories, something on the lines of them being typical women’s light reading…

I rather bridled at her comments – not to her face, I accepted her comments and mulled them over… but I don’t think my stalking story is exactly cosy… it may start off with the premise of a middle-aged woman’s silly fantasy, but it becomes a lot more scary than that! And as for the other, yes it involves a family, and family disputes, but I hope it will be exciting and a bit of a page turner… But perhaps I’m being too sensitive… what I write is probably typical women’s light reading…

Anyway… I wasn’t really content with either story, although no doubt will finish them and work on them and make them into something… but maybe foolishly, I started a third story. A new genealogical mystery has crept into my mind; I mentioned one aspect of it in my earlier post, a murder mystery from 1931; there are other strands too… an ancestor who was born in a French convalescent home in Brighton – there actually was such a place which only closed in the 1980’s, and a mysterious grave with two bodies, found in the overgrown garden of some friends who only recently moved in. A fifty year-old brother also becomes anxious about his forth-coming marriage, another brother longs to find a Ukrainian woman he loved and had a child with nearly forty years ago, and the ongoing story of the main character and his eve-expanding family…

This third story has suddenly taken off, and just today I have written nearly 5,000 words!! So… as well as the story i have just about finished and which should be published in the new year, it seems as if I have three more waiting in the wings!

Here is a link to where you can find my ebooks:

http://www.amazon.co.uk/s/ref=nb_sb_noss_1?url=search-alias%3Daps&field-keywords=lois+elsden