The Finishing Line. Or Paragraph. Or Even The Finishing Eight Chapters.

Right, here goes nothing. About 125 pages of nothing, to be exact. The actual finishing date for nanowrimo is tomorrow,at midnight in your local time zone. But because tomorrow night,I'll be doing my first bit of stand up in about a year for a charity gig,I'm going to have a damn good go at trying to finish the nano book tonight. This, however, might be a bit of a push,since there's still about 15,000 words left to make the word count.

You can tell that it's not a prospect I'm looking forward to, because I'm procrastinating by doing this blog. Writers are an idiotic lot sometimes. Very few other groups of people consider that the best way to avoid writing is to do some completely different writing.

What's odd is that it still feels like a short story, despite the fact that its currently running at 35,000 words. I mean, let's not kid ourselves here: it's very much a hack job, a situation that ain't gonna change when I cough out the last 15 thousand words in - I hope - less than seven hours. Nobody's going to produce anything of real quality in that night, not even if their name is Hemingway. But, frankly, that's not important - getting down the main body is, and I can come back in January to the carcass and pick over the bones. As terrible as this draft is - and it is terrible at the moment, it hasn't even got up to the level of first draft yet - I (even I, normally hyper self critical ) find bits of it readable. And here's the ... Encouraging/Depressing bit (delete as appropriate) ... This terrible, badly written, incomplete book, at least six drafts away from anything I wish to show to anyone. much less consider publication, is already better than some stuff I've seen uploaded to the kindle. This is something I very much need to keep in mind in the wee small hours of tonight.

NaNoWrimo : Day 1

Had a Ghostwalk tonight (well, last night, now) that was particularly well attended despite the appalling weather simply due to the fact that it was Halloween. I was a little nervous because a couple of friends were in the audience (friends always seem to rock up to the Ghostwalk exclusively on the nights that the weather is bad), but it all seemed to go pretty well, people seemed to enjoy themselves, and there were enough skull shaped lollipops to go around. 

It being Halloween, the Ghostwalk was later than I usually do it, and by the time I got home, it was already past the witching hour - in other words, November 1st. While this meant that there was no immediate need for me to start shaving (more about that another time), it meant that before I was going to go to sleep, I could already get started on my NaNoWriMo novel. To have any chance of completing 50,000 words by the end of November, I need to be logging about 1,700 words on a daily basis, which I'm already fairly confident that I'm going to fail miserably at. But it's only the start of NaNoWriMo right now, which should mean that I'm more able to hack out a few hundred words than I will be ale to in, say, two weeks time, even if those words make absolutely no sense whatsoever. 

While I have a rough idea of what's going to happen when in my story, I haven't really thought about it too much in advance, preferring to write it out almost as free form association. Tonight, that was the right thing to do, although obviously it may not work that easily for the rest of the project. I'm already aware that in the 2 or 3 pages I hacked out tonight, there are some terrible turns of phrase, and occasionally (on more than one occasion, in a piece of prose that lasts less than 4 pages), I'm jumping rather too suddenly from one subject to the next in order to make a point. 

Refreshingly, however, none of this seems to matter. All the prep and pep talks on twitter right now, which are mainly on USA time (where NaNoWriMo won't kick in for a couple more hours) cheerfully remind you that whatever you've written in a month's time, won't be ready in any way for publication. This month is just to get the damn thing (in this case, the damn thing being a very first draft) down on paper. I'm fairly confident that there will be at least 200 times in November where I'll really regret signing up for NaNoWriMo, and that anything I write is truly dreadful. What's comforting, though, is that by hacking out a thousand words tonight, I've already had that reaction twice already. Which means I've only got to go through it 198 times more. 

NaNoWriMo Wordcount: 1,177.  

NaNoWriMo - Before The Start

This week, then, I'm going to attempt something stupid and pointless. Well, more so than any other week, in any case. As November begins to kick in, and the nights get darker and colder, I find, for about the first time this year, less things to occupy my time than at any other point in the last twelve months. Of course, now that we all live in the future, and that, there are various things to conquer and destroy any feelings of boredom I may have been considering having. There is, of course, the whole growing a moustache thing for a month, which isn't so much a boredom-thrashing activity (you'd have to be pretty damn bored, wouldn't you?) but a charity awareness thing, which I'll be coming back to later in the week. 

I'm holding some improv workshops, the first of which is tonight (Sunday 28th). I'm a bit nervous that nobody's going to turn up, if I'm honest. Facebook has long ago ceased being a reliable indicator of how many people are actually going to turn up to your event. I have had a few people saying that they'll be there, and I think it will be the sort of thing that simply needs to be going for a few weeks before it catches fire. Not literally, I hope. 

But none of this is the stupid and pointless thing. Every November, thousands of people around the world attempt something called NaNoWriMo. In case you're not already familiar with the concept, NaNoWriMo stands for National Novel Writing Month. The aim is to do - to achieve - exactly what that name suggests: to hack out a novel in 30 days. The novel is a reasonably short one - the suggested aim for a word count is 50,000, which is - very roughly - the size of The HitchHikers Guide To The Galaxy, for instance, or Of Mice And Men. The real aim behind the whole enterprise is to get those people who are constantly telling themselves that one day they'll actually get around to writing a book .. to actually get around to writing a book. It doesn't even really matter about the quality, just getting the word count down. It averages out at about 1,500 words a day. This, I figure, should be just about manageable,even if we include the inevitable couple of days throughout the month where I only produce 500 words, or don't even get around to writing anything at all.

I'm deliberately only starting on November 1st, which is Thursday. Obviously, I could try and get a head start by starting now, but somehow it doesn't seem in the spirit of the whole adventure. I rather like the idea of starting this fool's errand at the same time as thousands of others all across the planet. I haven't even made any planning notes.

What I do have is a title and a vague plot line. A couple of years ago, a local publishing company was asking for submissions to an imprint they had, called Pulp Press. The stories they wanted were exactly that - pulp fiction, the sort of grimy 5 cent paperbacks you might have had in your back pocket in the 1940s or 50s. When men were bastards and women all wore Bettie Page bangs. Sex, violence and six inch heels. Needless to say, it's not exactly the sort of writing I normally do, but nonetheless, an idea did present itself. I was doing some stand up at the time (more than I do these days,anyway), and the stand up scene in Brighton, where I live, is sometimes quite insular. I began to have these ideas about various comics on the scene being bumped off in Brighton (it may have even been inspired by the old line about 'dying on stage'). However, as with many projects, I never actually got round to writing it, particularly as - even though I roughly knew who was going to die, and how (the last two deaths have been fairly fixed in my head now for the past two years), I've never really been able to work out why these deaths are occurring. Not being able to work out the reason for the catalyst has stopped me starting. Now, however: I'm going to put faith in the expectation that if I write enough of the story, a solution will eventually present itself. And even if it doesn't, it didn't stop other classic pulp writers. I think it was someone like Raymond Chandler - he'd finished The High Window, or maybe even The Maltease Falcon, which starts with a body being discovered. It's that death that's the catalyst for the entire story. But when the story ends, the murderer isn't revealed. It's the ultimate Macguffin. When asked by a fan what the deal was with the dead body, Chandler reportedly repiled: 'Oh, him. I forgot about him .. '

So, hopefully, as long as I can get a fairly entertaining story down, then logic can go hang. For the first draft, anyway. The story is going to be called Set Up, Punch by the way. I'll try to post a daily report on how it's all going, with a wordcount. Obviously, at the moment, the wordcount is exactly zero. I'm hoping it won't stay that way ..