Uh-oh. Anybody see the date today? It’s November 30, or in other words, the last day of NaNoWriMo. And my novel so far only consists of 17,069 words, a long way short of the NaNo goal of 50,000 words in a month.
I think we can all safely assume that I’m not going to come up with 32,931 words in the next twelve hours or so. So this year, rather than being a NaNoWriMo winner as I was last year, I guess you’d have to call me a NaNoWriMo loser!
So where’s …

Remember how I insanely finished my novel to enter the TAG Hungerford contest? I knew that a last-minute finish was a bad thing for that novel, but the value for me of actually getting something finished to enter the contest far outweighed the inevitability of not getting anywhere with the contest. But now that the award procedure is almost over (there are three shortlisted novels now, although the winner won’t be announced until February 2009), I’ve got even more value out of the process.
I recently received a “thanks but no …

It’s been a couple of months now since I finally unpacked every book I own into my amazing new bookshelves. My dream of having a room that looks like a library is now pretty much true (except that they’re not catalogued or anything, and there’s no woman in the corner telling me to be quiet).
One of the sections of these bookshelves (I’ll include a picture sometime – there are 48 square compartments to them) includes pretty much my entire collection of notebooks, both from travelling and general fiction scribbling notebooks …

When the programme for the 2009 Perth International Arts Festival arrived in our house last week there was a flurry of excitement: we love going to see the international films at the outdoor cinemas they set up (although we’re disappointed by the number of French films this year and not enough German ones …); and as for me, personally, finding out about next year’s Perth Writers Festival is exciting too.
The only problem is the Writers Festival doesn’t seem to be organised as far in advance as everything else, so this …

So I got re-started with NaNoWriMo and then I had another few days where I just didn’t get the fiction writing thing happening. And then today I read the Quiet Rebel Writer’s confession that this year she’s a NaNoWriMo dropout. Not quite what I was hoping to read about.
What can I say? The big problem is I broke my promise to myself about writing my novel before I wrote my paid writing. When push comes to shove, and I have just a little time, then I just have to do …

Regular readers might have been expecting a bit of a report on my NaNoWriMo progress after I started 10 days late but with great enthusiasm.
Excuses for not writing this week? Let me count the ways … or at least give you the abbreviated collection of bad reasons I gave myself for not writing. Starting with going back to teaching after nearly a month off (hey, more exhausting than I remembered) and leading through various dramas up to spending a fair whack of time helping out a friend with a problem, …

A funny thing just happened to me.
I was procrastinating about getting a bit of work done – or I could fudge that and say I was taking a bit of a break after getting a stack of work done this morning (that’s true – I wrote my first 2,500 words for NaNoWriMo and also did a heap of blogging).
In any case, one click led to another and I was suddenly taking a 20-question quiz on procrastination. At the end they told me my score was 30/100 and that meant my …

The relatives are safely back in Switzerland. I’ve nearly caught up on all the work I got behind on while they were here. November is rapidly ticking by. All this can only mean one thing: it’s absolutely, undeniably time that I got started on my novel draft for this year’s NaNoWriMo.
While other writers have been tapping away at their keyboard since November 1, I’m starting today. Since NaNoWriMo winners have to write 50,000 words before November 30, that leaves me with a daily target of 2,380 words (if you start …

The arduous yet addictive novel-writing feast that is NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month, for the uninitiated) began yesterday, November 1 – but I was busily holidaying in the south-west of Australia. I’ve got a tough week coming up relaxing on Rottnest Island with my in-laws from Switzerland, and only after that will I be seriously getting into NaNoWriMo.
But I’m excited about it. After last year’s NaNoWriMo “win” (that’s the term they use if you successfully complete a novel of at least 50,000 words during November) I know that I can …