Three Things you may or may not know about me...

You might know these, you might not...

1) I don't like giving up on a challenge - I view every anthology entry as a competition and if I really want to be in that anthology, I will not give up without a damn good fight. The same goes for NaNoWriMo

2) I'm not the best seamstress in the world - Thread and I don't get on. It has this irritating habit of tangling and knotting in my hands, making certain parts of my many hobbies very frustrating.

3) When I hit a problem, I sit back and think at it - Doesn't matter what the problem is, it could be to do with writing, it could be to do with knitting or earning money. Either way. I think about it.

I'm doing  NaNoWriMo at the moment. I'm using the second book of the "The Secret of Arking Down" Series for it and last night I finished the storyline. That's right. I got to the end of the main story. In 38 thousand words and change. I was not best pleased. So I thought about it and decided that my best bet was to go back over what I have written and rewrite each chapter, making sure it was the absolute best it could be. I've got time - the validator doesn't close until midnight on Tuesday.

This morning I started my quest. I sat down in my writing corner...

Anyone disturbing me when I am in here,
had better have a good reason...

Don't get me wrong, I love my writing corner, it's safely out of the way and I can often be overlooked by the kids when they come downstairs. The one flaw is behind the radiator you can see on the wall.

It's an air brick.

When I first moved to this corner, it was summer. The air brick provided a cooling flow past my feet and hands. However, now it's winter. We've had the first snowfall of the year (the earliest for 17 years apparently) and at night the temperature outside is a soothing -5. Urk!

As I was writing this morning, my toes (inside their slippers) and fingers were turning into icicles. It became difficult to type. Why didn't I just put the central heating on? Well, we're on a PAYG gas meter and I haven't the money available to use it willi-nilli. So I soldiered on, bumping my word count up to a solid 40k.

Then I had a thought. I have some white micro-fleece, why don't I make some gloves? I could finish them in a couple of hours. It can't be that hard, draw around my hands to make the size pattern. Cut them out. Sew them together. Easy, right?

And here's where my difficulties with thread come into play. I'm not going into detail, but blood was drawn, thread was snapped and tempers were frayed. So I put it to one side. I need to think about how to do the gloves some more, or I will not come out of it sane...

The Saga of NaNoWriMo.

It's November.

Anyone who has a writer for a partner or is a writer themselves will know what that means. Yup - it's NaNoWriMo time.

What? I didn't quite catch that... What is NaNoWriMo?

Ah, so you're one of them... okay, I'll explain.

NaNoWriMo stands for - National Novel Writing Month. It originally started in the U.S, but the madness has spread out internationally and now, in the thirty days of November, the writing world is put on hold while a horde of writers attempt to write 50,000 words.

And yes, I am participating. More fool me...

My word count stands at 23,183. I have over 26,000 words to go yet and eight days left to go. That means, I need to write 3.5K words a day to hit the finish tape. Why am I so behind? A little matter of Life, I'm afraid. A close relative died and between the children, consoling TOH and losing my muse a couple of times, I fell behind.

Several of my writing friends have finished already; one has reached the end of her story - and it's turned out to be a novella... Another couple have hit the 50K and are still going.

I'm determined to finsih the storyline to what I'm writing, but as far as hitting 50K on the 30th November is concerned, it's going to be a struggle...

Right then - time to get moving again! Wish me luck... I need it!

'Ullo, there's somethin' goin' on around 'ere...

You may have noticed that I've added a few pages. Don't bother going to look - they're empty at the moment.

I decided that I needed to streamline my online world. You see, when I log on in the morning, I spend a good hour or so trying to cover all the websites I'm on, adjusting my own websites, chatting... excuse me... NETWORKING on Facebook and so on.

It's one of the reasons that I rarely updated this blog - I'd designated it as my personal blog, but as my writing life is a major part of my 'normal' life, it never got updated... a fact of which I feel rather ashamed.

Anyway. I'm doing two things:

#1 - I am moving my writing website to this site - that way I don't have to adjust two different places!

#2 - I am going to transform the old weebly website into a competition website, with the prize being publication in my webzine.

It's going to take me a while to do, I have to shift all sorts of things around and adjust stuff on my computer... you know the sort of thing!

Then I should be able to blog more regularly. It's hopefully going to make my life much easier!

((hugs to all who pass through))

Mandy♥