NaNoWriMo 2020

Hello everyone,

As the title of this post suggests, I am taking part in NaNoWriMo this year. If you are unaware NaNoWriMo stands for National Novel Writing Month and the purpose is to motivate writers to set and reach a target before the month ends, normally 50,000 words. If that sounds herculean, it might help if I said that you could cut that target down to 1600 words a day. If that still sounds outlandish you could divide that by three and write 533 words in three different sittings.

I’ve completed NaNoWriMo in both 2018 and 2019 but this year, like every other aspect of our daily lives, things will be different. Due to the pandemic there will be no physical events. Normally we would go to a cafe in London, I particularly favoured the Pret on Hanover Square and spend a good afternoon writing. We would also visit a famous city close to London (last year, we had a day trip to Oxford in which I managed 9000 words) and have an all night write in. All of these events have, understandably, been cancelled. Instead all physical sessions have been moved online and will vary across different platforms such as Twitter, Facebook and Discord. I’ve downloaded everything I needed to, I’ve created my manuscript, mucked about with the formatting I’m penned my first two thousand words.

My manuscript’s working title is Gridlock. A father and son become trapped in gridlock on the Dartford Crossing (also known as the QE2 bridge) and realise there is a killer amongst them.

I plan to post a mid month update and second post at the end of my month evaluating my progress.

If anyone else is taking part, let me know and we can buddy up.

Until next time.