The best-laid plans of mice and men, and all that… Sixteen days in and the observant among you may have noticed it been eight days since my last update. Simply put doing the blog and trying to keep up with the word count was becoming too much of an issue. Something had to go by the wayside and these blog posts, as they are a product of doing NaNoWriMo this year, were the obvious sacrifice…

So drop the blog posts for a while and focus on writing the novel… great plan… and like all great plans equally doomed. This is because I’ve had a bit of a real-life interlude… Work has been hectic, and so I’ve been working extra long hours. The few events I had planned for, took more time out than I expected. Such as watching Alice Cooper getting beheaded by a vengeful Nurse Betty taking up the what was left of Saturday after I had to work that morning… (which as it was Alice Cooper, was worth losing a day to…)

But between full day gigs and fuller than usual days at work, my writing time has been limited. On top of which I got back a serval chapter edit of ‘Spider in the Eye’ the current novel I am actually working on (aside from the NaNoWriMo tale)  and lost another couple of days working through the notes from the proofreader. I hadn’t expected anything back till form them until the end of the month, but the questions I was being asked dragged me back to the story and I thought I would be fine losing an hour or two looking at them ( two days later, damn…). Then there was more work; a simple two-hour job turned into a twenty-hour shift at the coalface and… Well, to use one of my favourites Douglas Adams quotes… Whoosh…

So here I am, 16 days in and only 10000 words down on paper, calling it a draw… All I can really do is caulk it up to experience, take what I have and not worry too much about it. It is not the first time that I have crashed out on NaNoWriMo, it won’t be the last, but as my real job is not going to ease off for the next week or so, and I have another busy weekend ahead I am going to stop trying to force the writing to happen.

But there is a bright side to this, failure though it may be, no one really fails at NaNoWriMo. I have 10000 words down of a good solid premise, the dotted plan of an interesting story and while it’s going in the scrap file on my hard-drive, for now, there are elements of both the story and the characters I can and will reuse. Indeed, it occurred to me while I was writing it that much of it would work within the Passing Place framework. Indeed it was shaping up to be very much a Passing Place style tale that while it will not directly fit into ‘Something Red’ the sequel I have sketched out for my 2016 novel ‘Passing Place‘, it may well be drawn upon anyway. It actually fits well in the very rough sketches I have for the third in the series.

So, while I am disappointed to be bowing out of NaNoWriMo2017, I am philisop[ical about doing so. No writing is ever wasted. At the very least, all writing is practice in the art. To steal another quote…

I found my voice with ‘Cider Lane’ and ‘Passing Place’ but I still need to practise the art, every author does, and a whole lot fo my ‘million’ words were written in previous NaNoWriMo ventures… So for those who like me have found themselves struggling with NaNoWriMo this year. Take heart; you lose nothing through trying and falling by the wayside because even if you fail to hit those deadlines you will gain more for the trying than you ever would if you hadn’t tried at all…

So, adios for now, and for those still in the chase, the best of luck to you all. I’m back to working on ‘A Spider In The Eye’ in what little writing time November seems to be affording me. Which has its own deadline, which already went whooshing by me a couple of months ago…

Mark

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