The Trials and Tribulations of Writing A Novel.

Yes, that's right, I wrote a novel. All 52,347 words of it were my own creation and ideas. It was hell. I was part of a international website all doing the same thing, called National Novel Writing Month, where the idea is to write a 50,000 word novel in 30 days. Luckily for me, I already had a rough idea of what I wanted to write about, and quite an extensive knowledge about my chosen ideas, but still, there came times when I wished I'd never started and I got writer's block worse than I ever thought it could get.

At one point, I was writing over 5,000 words per day, as me being me, started 9 days in to the 30 days, meaning I had only 21 days to write these 50,000 words. Seriously, I cut in to my social life like nothing I'd ever done before, meaning I was thinking about what to write next all the time, and even rushing home from work to get started once I realised I enjoyed it so much. 


Luckily, if I felt like procrastinating, which happened often, I had the comforts of the NaNoWriMo forums (as well as Facebook and the Download Festival forums) to distract me for a little while, and often get ideas from posts made all over the world. The support given on the NaNoWriMo forums was amazing, people from all over the world giving constructive criticism, beefing out plot lines and even giving pep talks if you were failing was all part of the reason I succeeeded. 


I will probably be posting some bits from my novel at some points, it's still in the editing stages, with my Mum reading my proof copy at the moment to see what she thinks needs improved as well as my own ideas of improving it. Thanks to an American company called CreateSpace, I was able to get a full proof copy, in complete book form, for free due to completing NaNoWriMo, so I actually have a book I can say I wrote.


There were the bad times when I thought I'd never finish and felt like blowing it all off and never doing it again, but overall, it was a very enjoyable experience, and I look forward to trying again next year, or even the following if I don't get Life Matters edited and totally completed my next year!