Matthew Walton’s Blog

…and it’s done! 50,153 words, story not finished, not sure I actually want to finish it. I’ve got too many ideas for better stories I had while I was writing it, but could hardly change over to with 30,000 words written.

No, you’re not going to see the novel. You wouldn’t like it anyway. I suspect some of the good bits will end up in other stories of mine later though. Overall, NaNoWriMo has accomplished its purpose for me. It’s made me write, got the juices all flowing again. Now I can sit down and plan my next series for the h2g2 Post in relative comfort, knowing that if I can churn out an almost-readable 50,000 word part-novel in a month, I can certainly do 30,000-odd words in much more time than that and make them reasonably readable.

I’m going to go and grin a lot now. Please excuse me, and also visit my writing for NaNoWriMo page to see the official winner’s icon!

The 150th entry in this blog. Hmm. If anyone’s still reading this, I’m amazed. You’ve survived 150 entries of pure boredom and you’re still coming back. Someone should write a book about you. Not me though, my NaNovel is at 38,500 or so words, and needs more in order to get me to finish on time. I intend to, but I don’t intend to actually finish the story, because I’m now extremely bored with it.

What I’d like to do instead is take one of the minor characters from the story and put them in a slightly different world to write something much more interesting.

Got back from my holiday today, will see about posting some photos of the gorgeous north coast of Northern Ireland, and some of the Boyne valley passage tombs in Ireland, some time tomorrow. Or possibly next week. Or the week after. (Don’t hold your breath).

Reached the big 30,000 today. It’s getting harder to write

Can’t put suitable words together for this entry, so I’ll just mention that on Wednesday morning I’m flying out to Northern Ireland. Back on Monday, so don’t panic if I drop off the radar for a bit. I’ll have my mobile with me if anyone really needs to get in touch.

Today I deleted 3,000 words of my novel. This sounds like a veyr stupid thing to do, and it probably is, but the story was going in a direction which would have dead-ended it very shortly, and I didn’t want to take that risk. Being somewhat ahead of the strict daily average word count target, I figured it was worth attempting it this way instead of the other way.

I now have 2,000 replacement words which are much better, and more on the way. Current word count is 23,554. The plan is to have 32,000+ by the end of Sunday, although this might not prove possible. I intend to try though, because it’s fairly necessary if I’m to be able to go on holiday and not spend hours writing every day.

Yes I know it’s actually day eleven, but it’s the morning so I feel justified in writing about yesterday’s progress, and that achieved over the weekend which I sort of missed out as I was busy writing and doing a few other things too.

Word count as of the end of last night: 22,883.

Things are going fairly well, although I’m a bit dubious about a lot of what I wrote last night because the good guys won too easily. Perhaps I’ll go back and make it more interesting, which would entail some degree of re-writing, probably have to lose 1,000 words or so, but I am significantly ahead of the average day-to-day progress required, so for the sake of the rest of the plot it’s probably worth it.

Yes, I think I’ll do that.