A novel idea

I took part in this year's National Novel Writing Month, or NaNoWriMo to give it its Japenese sounding name, and am pleased to report I scraped in with 50,300 words by the 29th of November - around 220 pages.

The ethos is very much to write quantity, not worry about the quality, but then to go back and edit, re-edit, draft, re-write and polish the chunk of text you have to work on (you can't edit a blank page), rather than merely saying you're going to write a book but never actually do. Needless to say I do not feel my book is anywhere near close to anything resembling publishable, however, maybe after much editing and drafting it will be, who knows.

It was a fun challenge though, and the positive message of the website through which it is run - essentially, just write and write but don't stop and don't worry about quality or anything like that - does really help you stop being self-critical and just keep getting the words down on the page - 1,666 a day to be precise.

I'd recommened it to anyone who has also wondered about / wanted to write a novel, but perhaps the only problem is now you'll have to wait a whole year to do it...