And so it begins..

Today marks the begining of nanowrimo, 30 days of self-imposed deadlines and writing purely for the sake of forcing oneself to write. This year I'm trying something a little different and looking to write a black comdey fantasy epic. It's mostly an exercise in trying to write a different style with a different 'voice'. Two paragraphs in (whilst drinking that first cup of tea in the morning) and it feels ok so far.

The biggest challenge is keeping up the word count. Fifty thousand words in a month means 1666 words per day (easier to round up to 1700 for the maths). From past experience, some days this is easy. On the days when you miss the target, or don't get any writing done at all, the prospect of 3400 words the following day to make up gets to become a very daunting target. Ultimately its as much an exercise in time management and self comittment than anything else.

One would hope that the more you write the better you get (unless you just keep repeating the same mistakes) so nanowrimo is all about the writing (with less focus on the quality). Of course, I don't know many people that write who are perfectionists about the craft to some extent, so there's generally some personal conflict involved in these sorts of undertakings.

My current intetnion is to update things here with a reasonable degree of frequency throughout the task, if only to serve as a mental pushing mechanism for myself. If nothing else a rolling word count update should be posted every few days.