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November 2016: ...The Storm

1/12/2016

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I mentioned last month that October was The Calm Before, whilst November looked set to be The Storm.

This is because November is NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month) and I was planning to write the customary 50,000 words in 30 days.

Well... November was certainly stormy, but it was more like a blustery bad day at the beach rather than Hurricane Katrina. I finished the month with 32,000 words, which is nowhere near target. I have hit the target once before in November 2013, which is how I wrote The Sheriff, but never since.

So, this month was a little disappointing. My excuses include having a baby, a bout of food poisoning, and discovering Downton Abbey for the first time. I have just watched Series 3 Episode 5. Noooooo!

Nevertheless, this has still been my most productive month of writing so far this year, even topping my Rio-inspired writing binge in August. Over 1000 words a day is not too shabby. This means my third Nephos novel is now at 83,151 words. I'm only about a third of the way through the story, which means I might actually be writing an epic.

A Game of Thrones is 298,000 words, so I could be approaching George R R Martin levels of prose.

What else have I done this month?

1. Guest Lecture - I spoke to the first-year students on the Creative Writing course at the University of Birmingham. My talk was similar to my Book To The Future talk and covered self-publishing and self-marketing.

2. Happy Birthday Circ - our collaborative novel Circ celebrated its 2nd birthday, having been published on 25 November 2014. The Circ launch seems like yesterday. I interviewed myself to mark the occasion.

3. Christmas Posts - I have written two festive posts to raise awareness of Festive Treats, our free anthology of Christmas stories. One post is about how to win a Christmas pub quiz and the other offers 50 of the "best" Christmas cracker jokes. These have prompted huge numbers of visitors to my website, which shows that nonsensical click-bait drives more traffic than book reviews and writing advice. Duly noted.

Next month: Christmas time. To honour the season of good will, I am going to review at least two novels by fellow self-published authors. After all, writers should help other writers. Also, the winner of the BWG Winter Competition will be announced!

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