Well it’s November and November can be an important month in writer-world. November means NaNoWriMo. What does that mean, you might ask? Well, it means National Novel Writing Month.
And today, I’ve just formatted my new file to start book 20, so I can join in. During NaNoWriMo, you’re supposed to write about 50,000 words – that’s more than half a book. Break that down even further and it’s only 1,666 words per day. And that is less than a chapter a day. (I work on about 2,000 – 2,500 words in a chapter).
When someone says 50,000 words, it can almost seem like it’s too many, it’s overwhelming and frightening… But as you can see, when it’s broken down into tiny pieces, it’s not at all concerning. It’s looks really easy.
If you want to join up to NaNoWriMo, there’s a website you can google up, but also remember if you want to have a go at setting daily writing times, try my online course Between the Pages. This is the perfect time to put that course to good use and get your word count down. (Shameless plug!)
So today, I’m hoping my first 1,666 words will go down. But to do that, I need to name my new characters – and how do I do that? Well, it’s actually a bit of a mixed up process. First off I google baby names. I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but every main female character I’ve got has an ‘a’ on the end of her name. Zara, Gemma, Emma, so on and so forth. I don’t know why that happened. I realised I’d done it at about Silver Clouds and just kept the tradition going. Once I’ve settled on a girl’s name, then I open up the very old copy of the White Pages, I’ve got and search for a surname I like. Then I do it for every character I create.
I could spend hours mulling over what I’m going to call my new friends, but I try not to – yes, their names have to be perfect for them, but it’s not a task that needs to take hours.
Harvest hasn’t started at my place yet, and today, there isn’t any interviews for the release of Deception Creek (they start tomorrow) so I’m going to make the most of these November days to break the back of Book 20, so we can have a huge celebration in November 2022., when it comes out!
