oh for more time

Am weighing up the pros and cons of attempting Nanowrimo again - it's due to begin tomorrow. Um. Nanowrimo, in case you've not heard of it, stands for National Novel Writing Month, the principle being that we all know that we'll never get round to writing a novel, but we all want to do it, just the same. Nanowrimo requires you to give up 30 days of your life and force yourself to write a 50,000 word novel in that time.

Which means knuckling down and forcing yourself to write - being short on time makes you short of inhibitions, short of the normal impulse to go back and chop and change and frustrate yourself with the intricacies of plot. This way the only way to write it is to write it, as fast as you can and as free as you can. You mightn't end up with something worthy of the Whitbread Prize, but face it, you'll never write a novel any other way.

All this and more I told myself this time last year (in fact, I even told you, too), but... well, it's no surprise that Nanowrimo didn't work out for me last November. I wrote about 11,000 words, I think, in the end - which is pretty credible but not good enough when you need to be writing around 1,700 words a day.

So I'm tempted to try again as of tomorrow. I have a laptop now, so it should be easier to do. On the other hand, if I say I'm going to do it, I surely won't. So I might.

Apologies in advance if I post a 50,000 word novel to the blog in a month's time :-)