Across the finishing line!

Yes, that's right! At 9.45 last night (24th November, GMT) I hit 50044 words in the closing stages of Chapter 13. As soon as the chapter was complete I decided to validate early before the rush kicks in, and came up with the grand total of 51258. There are two more chapters to write, so I'll spend the next couple of days getting them finished before working out the final tally. I think this year's novel has been even more fun to work on than last year's, so that always helps.

NaNo 2010 - Week 3 Round Up

Well folks, it round up time again. Aside from Wednesday, which didn't really have a chance to take off as I had to make a pretty late start, I haven't done too badly this week. I set myself the goal of reaching 40k before the close of Friday, which I did by getting to 40098. Now I've reached the grand total of 44419, so I'm rather pleased :) I'm guessing that the whole thing should be finished after the next three chapters, so altogether it will be longer than 50k. How much longer, I haven't got a clue.

NaNo 2010 - Week 2 Round Up

Well it's update time again, and at the end of Day 14/Week 2 my total has reached 30381. On Saturday night I finally put the lid on the monster that is Chapter 5, which is gathering dust as almost 11k (can't remember the exact total, but it's definitely closer to 11k than 10k). Before I even made a start on that one two extra and very minor characters were added by writing themselves into an earlier chapter, though they were only mentioned in two other characters' backstories. One of them gave me an idea for a twist towards the end of the novel, which then led to an idea for an even bigger twist!

NaNo 2010 breaking news!

Well folks, at the close of Day 12 I've crept past the 25k mark with 25038 words! It was all thanks to managing to pull 3540 words out of the bag, and Chapter 5 still has a little way to go. 1000 words at the most should finish it, and it is the historical account of the first werewolf in the family after all....

Normal service will resume on Sunday night.

NaNo 2010 - Week 1 round up

As promised, here's my round up of the first week of the chaos that is NaNoWriMo. So far I've completed the prologue and three chapters, and at the moment everything seems to be moving along at about the right pace. My protagonist is suitably terrified by what appears to have been an attack on some farm animals by a large stray dog, and Chapter 4 will act as the lead-in to her discovering that it's really a werewolf that was responsible.

The madness begins!

It's Day 2 of NaNo 2010, and I'm pleased to announce that my current word count (as shown by the little widget at the left of the page) is 3530. It may not be a staggering total, but it's a tad over the projected Day 2 average :) So far I've completed the prologue - which is slightly longer than originally intended - and I'm part way through Chapter 1. In the past I've found that I usually start to pick up speed after the first two and a half chapters or thereabouts, so maybe the little green bar on the left (and my little blue bar on the NaNo site) will resemble more than a tiny square by the weekend!

As with last year I intend to blog about NaNo at the end of each week, so for those who are interested in following my progress you should see a new post on Sunday night. Now that the clocks have gone back and we're on Greenwich Mean Time again, writing is the perfect way to spend those long, dark evenings....

Almost NaNo time ...

The forums on the official NaNo site have been wiped and made ready for this year's session, and a shiny new set of web badges are available. I've chosen a smaller badge for this year:



Now there's just short of a month to wait until kick off ....