NaNoWriMo!

I will acknowledge my complete failure to write anything on this blog for several days, but in all fairness I've taken on a lot of new things lately (clubs, prefecting, volunteering, running newsletters, etc.) and I just can't keep up! To make my life even more complicated, I'm going to be doing NaNoWriMo for the the next time, starting Tuesday.

If you don't already know, NaNoWriMo stands for National Novel Writing Month, and it takes place every November. The clue's in the name, really: the aim is to write a novel in a month, will the word count goal of 50,000 in 30 days, so the daily word count is about 1,667 words. And that's every - single - day.

I did NaNoWriMo last year and, while I did manage to reach 50,000 words, few of those words did anything to move the plot along, enhance characterisation or...umm...well, basically, I wrote a load of crap. This year, I have a plan that's been in the making since July, so I'm a lot more prepared. At least two-thirds of my novel is planned out scene-by-scene, so there's no room for me to go astray and repeat the exact same scene three times in different locations (ahem, not that I did that last year).

To summarise, my novel is about death - this isn't surprising, as everything I write has a death at some point. In fact, last year I got to about 30,000 words and had so few ideas that I killed of a couple of characters just for something to do. If I'd been writing an zombie apocalypse novel, that would've been acceptable, but in your everyday school there just aren't that many deaths in the space of half a year.

But anyway, my main character - Erin - is in the car with her boyfriend, Oscar, when their car crashes into another. Oscar dies, as does the driver of the other car, who was the mother of a little girl named Faye. Faye and Erin meet and basically help each other to deal with their losses. I'm terrible at summarising, but there you go.

I'll warn you now that this blog is likely to turn into a place for me to update on NaNoWriMo and complain about how awful it is (but don't worry, I DO love it really). However, I'll try to be constructive and give you a few tips on writing while I'm doing so much of it. This could end up being in the form of me giving an example of what I've just written, and telling you why it's so awful, but I'll at least try to be positive.

I'm so, so, so excited about NaNoWriMo right now, and I can't wait to get started!