NaNo..WhyMe?

Right now, I seem to be asking myself 'why did you decide to do this (you utter nutter)?'

I'm referring, of course, to my decision to take part in NaNoWriMo.
The main reason I decided to give it a go this year was in order to give myself a good, swift, kick to finally write.

Not that the problem is my lack of actually writing, but, rather other people not leaving me alone and letting me get on with it. Thus, waving this official participant badge (and the website) at them makes me hopeful that I will be allowed to write and not be 'nagged' or disturbed.

That said, I'm also hopeful that NaNoWriMo will get me utilising my blog properly now.
Speaking of the blog, I'm not entirely happy with the layout and colourings, so they may be tweaked at a later date. I've also added my twitterfeed over to the side - my tweets are protected on site but appear in the feed, which is good ;)

So, for now that is all and let's hope I can get myself into a regular blogging mood now.

Note to self: I have blogs

Since my knee injury in October, I seem to have forgotten that I have blogs. Which I'm a bit annoyed with myself about as I decided to do said blogs to keep myself writing, and keep track of how my quest for writing is going. And I use the term 'quest for' loosely.

Along with the novel, I've recently been working on a short story for the Writers' of the Future Contest which is currently in its first draft but still needs a lot of work. I've tried to put a time-scale on it, giving myself until the 29th of July (which is when I go into hospital for my MRI scan on my knee) to finish it. So hopefully, as long as all goes well, I'll have that done, dusted off and submitted for the final quarter of the year.

Taking the idea further...

It's only in this last year, after finishing my studies, that I've started my quest to write the novel. Subscribing to Writing Magazine and getting myself a copy of the Writers & Artists' Yearbook . I also bought myself New Novelist - a programme that many people I know bought it and seemed to think it would write the novel for them. Personally I like the programme being that it makes keeping notes a hell of a lot simpler than notebooks and scraps of paper all over the place, not finding them until weeks later - something I found I had a great knack for.

My ambition is not to write the next best-selling blockbuster but to just write down a six year old idea that won't leave me alone until the characters' stories are told. If it leads to me becoming published than that would be a delightful bonus.

Hard to ignore...

When an idea that popped into your head six years ago lingers around there and just keeps growing and growing, how can you ignore it?

Well this is what happened to me. At the age of 15 an idea for a novel popped into my head. At the time I didn't know what to make of it - I took out an old notebook and jotted down the few things I could and then put it aside.
I'd always written stories and had recently branched out into fanfiction, finally doing the unthinkable - showing other people how I wrote. For this time I ignored the idea and focused on writing fanfiction.

When I started my studies at school I hadn't thought about the idea for almost a year. When, on day, I was clearing out some old books and found a tatty old notebook - in which was the idea, along with names that had popped into my head. Reading it seemed to bring it all back and I found myself jotted down more and more notes. Eventually writing full character bios and even some scenes.