NaNoWriMo

One of the blogs I follow is that of a fellow(and far more successful) writer. And one of his recent posts informed us writers that next month is NaNoWriMo- that is, National Novel Writing Month. The idea is that you register with the site and start writing your novel, a bit every day, and by the end of the month you end up with 50,000 words which is a fair chunk of a goodly sized book. No editing, no faffing, just write, write, writing, the idea being that amassing a big old chunk of drivel is better than amassing a big old chunk of nothing.

(Excuse me a moment, but Pandora is in the tissue box AGAIN, shredding Kleenex or at least the Sainsbugs own-brand equivalent.)

Right. And yesterday, on the back of the review section of the Guardian, was a magnificent full colour advert for the Faber Academy, detailing their 6-month writing courses, one of which is entitled 'Writing a Novel from Start to Finish' with Esther Freud (whom I've heard of) and Richard Skinner (whom I haven't. But I did go to primary school with someone called Richard Skinner. Couldn't possibly be him though, he was more interested in tractors and being tall.)

So it seems I am being pushed by the Universe to do some kind of new and massive writing task over winter. The kind of writing task that has an outside controlling influence which is good, because I need to be distracted from Winter and the dark mornings, the dark nights, the cold and the wet and the sight of Christmas cards in the shops from mid-September. (Besides, I'm making my own Christmas cards this year. I have already decided this. I planned to do this last year, but chickened out. But this year is going to be an artisan economic Christmas. Home-made cards with a witty Christmas ode inside).

I need to explore the two options properly - the NaNoWriMo and the Faber - because I am guessing on a purely assumptive basis that the NaNo option will be either free or very cheap to pursue, and the Faber option will be very, very expensive, purely from the list of famous name writer/tutors whom I very much doubt would give their services for free to us lesser writing mortals.

If Faber is expensive, then I shall have to either a) go back to teaching to fund the course which means not having the time or the calm mind to write or b) ignore the idea and consign the advert to the recycle bin.

But the NaNoWriMo thing is already tempting me. So that shall be my task for today - to explore potential new sources of writing. Also, I think it's coming up to the time of year for the Daily Mail first novel competition (if they are running it this year) and that will be a good home for 'Indigo Antfarm, Violet and Blue.

Other tasks for this week include:
1) replacing the old bark chippings in Cluckinghen Palace with new bark chippings, and worming the hens for winter
2) replacing the tyres on the car, for winter
3) coming up with a Christmas card design and poem to place therein
4) having a trip or two out because Andy is on holiday this week
5) tutoring on Wednesday (we did spellings last week; this week we shall be addressing sentence components e.g nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs (both passive and active - well, in for a penny in for a pound, that's what I say), prepositions, connectives, synonyms, antonyms, and one of my favourites, onomatopoeia, just because it's a great word to say).

And that's about it.