43 seems reasonable given the site’s name. I’d like to write more. It’s the breadth of the books that I’m really interested in; not just one subject area but many. It’s exciting. It is happening too. 3 years ago

I wrote a report for work which is becoming kind of controversial, and it’s putting me off writing, because people are asking ‘who wrote it’ like I can’t write English or something. I disgusted myself by answering that my audience weren’t EMT, but hell, since when did I give up that easily?

Being put under the microscope puts you off writing anything. But I shall not be deterred. My spelling and grammar have gone to shit, I mix my idioms and I can no longer structure a paragraph in the expected way.

But no-one else dared write the report. So HAH. 6 years ago

arrived today (ok I’m a bit behind with nano). Along with ‘Get things done’

haha! what on earth was I thinking? 6 years ago

Nanotime!

Okay, I’m two hours late. I’ll catch up :) 6 years ago

i just remembered nanowrimo is coming around again.

This time I’ve learned my lesson. Tell everyone you’re going to do nanowrimo so you can legitimately bunk off evey so often ‘writing your novel’, give up half way through and keep deliciously lovely memories of trying. And don’t kill everyone in the first paragraph. 6 years ago

out my nanonovel – took bloody ages, because even though we have a new printer it jams every page – and cut up the characters so I could work out where they’d got up to. It was hilarious! Absolute lack of consistency – there’s unintended time travel, they randomly change hair and name and personality when they come back to life (!), it’s raining and sunbaked in the same paragraph. People meet each other in chapter eight who were brother and sister in chapter two. My attempts to write something that would also appeal to boys (think grisly carcrashes but with absolutely no understanding of car positioning and relative speeds, but ha! as I’m a girl I know what colour they all are!) veers off into chicklit at every available opportunity. All I can think is thank god I hadn’t read Andy McNab or there’d be SAS men abseiling in to provide a bit of excitement.

Oh it’s too deliciously bad! I can’t wait for nano to start again. 6 years ago

when i said I was between novels. Hahahaaaa. It’s precious and poncey. But really I am. Having a lovely writing transition and writing a book for my kids. About moving. They are going to have mad adventures when we move.

If anyone can bear reading my Enid-Blyton-it’s-going-to-be-alright prose and question me about my unconscous conditioned gender modelling and choice of monsters, and act as spelling corrector cos they will learn French all wrong if they learn it from me…you would be doing my kids a big service. Highly non-lucrative, thankless task but they didn’t take to proust so I have to break them in another way.

Will they read it? Kids know mummy’s always cooking something. But will it be edible?

I need a second opinion. 7 years ago

i was holding forth about Andy McNab when I hit the wrong button and deleted it.

But swooon. I have a date tonight. There’s an SAS man waiting in my bed.

Sorry, I’ve been on the Eurostar, Trashy Book Heaven, and well, I’m having a mild crush. 7 years ago

out of the oven. It’s been baking for far too long.

God I LOVE to write. I’d almost forgotten how fun it is. 7 years ago

books. I want to write in long rambling sentences written in a linear fashion with more than six words on every line. I want to write complete sentences with subjects in them. I want my sentences free of little round dots, or squares or even diamonds. I do not wish to supply conceptual diagrams to convey messages, I want to write them down, not draw them.

Sometimes I think about how many brains in offices all over the world are being reformatted by powerpoint-induced thought patterns. It’s quite a scary thought. 7 years ago

(yes still going, just very late, story of my life) needs a twist I think.

Shit that’s like finding a major design error. Better late than never, surely.

Note to self: find a twist. A really BIG one. 7 years ago

I send my precious novel to the one person who would appreciate it…and she doesn’t get round to reading it!

haha! And to think I was sweating over the send button. Oh, it’s glorious. Thank you Lord. May I never forget. 7 years ago

in this rashful new year mood I’m in. I actually sent off the first chapter and a half to someone. Okay, if anyone gets my sense of humour it’s her, so it’s cheating. But she knows how sensitive I am so it’s a good place to start. At worst, we shall laugh together about how shit it is.

But fuck it man, asseblief. Felt good. 7 years ago

It’s a bit like back-to-school time.

Like nanowriting was. Every year I get all impatient to crack open a new diary at midnight and start gushing into its pages. There is something deliciously introspective about the whole new year business. I always get nicely maudlin, and those resolutions are great to look back on.

But I realize I can’t keep writing in so many notebooks, diaries and stuff. Some friends joke about my early onset Alzheimers because I can’t actually be parted from pen and paper, and I get almost disturbed when I have to. But the real confusion comes from having so many flipping notebooks on the go.

Have been backsliding lately. I think it came from having visitors in the house – I didn’t want my zapbooks lying about, so I started new ones. But then after a while I didn’t want those ones lying about. Sigh. Need to go back to writing all in the same place. My mind is all over the place and I can’t find important stuff I wrote down. Confusion! It is a really bad habit to get in to. So taking this New Year opportunity to go back to the one.

The rules will be: Date / Time stuff goes in the moleskin mmmm agenda.
Everything else (and everything – no special notebook for work, no special notebook for novels, no special notebook for kids stuff etc etc) goes in The Same Zapbook.

Guess which one I’m going to leave behind all the time…Maybe I should do it the other way round. But then there won’t be enough space.

Maybe I should just accept I’ll never know what day it is or when I’m supposed to be doing something and not beat myself up about it so much. Hmm. That sounds good. 7 years ago

do I have this burning desire to sit down and rewrite my nanonovel?

Could it have anything to do with the fact I am supposed to be packing to leave early tomorrow? 7 years ago

my nanonovel. I miss it. 7 years ago

okay I have had so much fun doing this, but the rest of my life has got busier and shittier and who do I think I’m kidding – if I keep writing in this state of mind I’ll end up writing the most miserable depressed piece of crap known to womblekind, and still won’t make the word count. That’s just pointless.

But what total fun to do. I was not mistaken about the endorphin highs. I think i’m going to do it for the first week of every month. If I did that for the rest of my life, I could probably get to 43 books…and still have a life. Or a ‘no life’ as nobodysperfect so perfectly put it!

Hope everyone else manages it! Will be saving lots of cheers up! 7 years ago

Are we really supposed to be at a thousand words already? Surely I read that from someone in a different time zone! Like five times around the world away?

I’m sadly behind. 7 years ago

it wasn’t necessary to spend time with real live adolescents in order to work out how to write the mobile phone version of 1984.

That’s the book I’d really like to write right now. 7 years ago

because it started at midnight, I have a mental daily midnight starting time. And I’m not very good at tracking days. And there is the whole falling asleep goal, the one I didn’t put up here. Like as in how does one, if one does not write oneself to sleep? Otherwise known as ‘I’m boring myself here’

I loathe all of my characters, even though I killed them off in the first chapter. haha. They are coming back to haunt me!

My aim was to write something really nice about humanity but I think I should probably just go with exorcising my demons in private instead. And when I’m done with that I can write 43 great books. From my vantage point in the clouds! 7 years ago

killed everyone off before the first thousand words. What was that about? That wasn’t in the plot. Not a terribly good idea. Revived them all during the lunch hour. But discovered writing in the office probably not a good idea, because diverse and interesting characters will all join together in one monotonous rant about databases and coworkers’ music choices.

hmmmm. 7 years ago

and came back to piss about here. It wasn’t meant to be bloodcurling!

Shit. 7 years ago

oooh it’s killing me. Ten minutes to go. Can’t decide what to write. Maybe I’ve got time to design the cover. 7 years ago

who wants to do nanowrimo too. We are going to do it together and bookcross the results (he calls it “book treasure hunting”). Obviously he won’t be worrying about word count!

He is going to write about a little boy who has got to a really good bit on the computer game when his mum knocks on the door and says he has to stop. I can’t tell you the rest but it involves inside-door locking devices…haha. 7 years ago

is almost here…I’m so excited! But what shall I write? Which one? Will I write any of them?

I discovered a little Japanese moleskin notebook that is one piece of paper that folds out into sixty little ones – too cool for plotting. But I didn’t get it (even though I’ve been obsessing about it for two days) because it was too nice to write on and I just know I’d change my mind after five minutes and it would sit there all lonely and spoiled.

Did have a good idea though. If I write it, I’m going to bookcross it and see where it ends up. 7 years ago

or whatever it’s called.

it would be like a Marathon For Lazy People.
Endurance. Stamina. Endorphin highs? 7 years ago

daydreaming about na mo wri mo (i can’t actually say that without getting that ya mo be there song on the brain – now wouldn’t that be highly irritating for the entire month of November). Meant to get an early night, but keep coming up with mad plots, so have to get this out of my system.

It would be a tremendously healthy addiction to have compared to the others (43T addiction excluded), and I know I can write loads of drivel in a really short time – like this – and the point is that you can write even worse drivel if you have to write, so why would I do I want to do it?

It’s like the shit origami goal, the point isn’t about making it good, it’s about the “experience”. I mean if I understood the rules, no-one’s actually going to read it unless you beg and plead, so you don’t have to worry about criticism. I think you have to email it encrypted – is that in case it falls into the wrong hands!

But then it would be a laugh to do it as part of a team or something, if you could just gripe on about how shit you were. I’d have so much fun coming up with “the worst sentence I wrote yesterday”.

Am going to have to make a decision on this in case it drives me mad. Still, I checked the date on my computer and it tells me it’s May 16, 2003, so I guess I have plenty of time. 7 years ago

to write speeches for politicians. if they are going to start becoming as empty headed as George W, it could be more fun to write the stuff they say, as all they do is read it out and make the right eyebrow movements.

And that would be a really cool way to change the world without anyone really ever knowing. 7 years ago

I am never writing anything on a C drive EVER again.
What I need is to find a place where other people look after it. Like a private Ruby application that will be nice to enter it in, and will look after it for me, and then I can go through as many crappy hard drives as they can possibly manufacturer in the whole of Taiwan and I won’t care at all.

It’s soooo annoying. I always end up philosophical about it but it just hurts so much to lose all those emails, photos and novel experiments. It’s like having your life wiped out in a few seconds, and it takes forever to put it back in your memory. 7 years ago

if you wrote one bestseller, and got shit loads of money for it, cos ppl bought it, well after that you might feel under pressure to write another, there might even be a whole cinema industry expecting stuff. That wouldn’t be a life.

I think I’d like to write 43 books with none of that stress, keep them under my bed, and when I die someone else could make use of the money if it made any. It could be like the Polish Box of Secrets that they kept among themselves when the Germans were attacking. not that they sold their secrets or anything.

If my kids aren’t money oriented, they might get in to the idea and write 43 books and one day…I’d rather they did that than join the army. Scribbling away in your little notebook never did any harm to anyone.

oh well, one day the Germans (or whoever, probably the US) would attack and then you never know, they could maybe sell all of their scribblings in exchange for a quiet life. Or does that sound like Lena Reifenstahl?! 7 years ago