I've been writing like a silly thing these past couple of days as I need to get my word count to a point I can be comfortable on the days I have other commitments - sitting now at 9432 words - nearly a fifth of the target for the month. Of course, there's no guarantee anything I've written is going to be worth keeping - but I hope it is. Either way the novel is on track to be completed to first draft by the end of November and then the hard work of editing begins.

I have found Nanowrimo easier than last year and this is due to having an outline and chapter outlines to follow. Last year I just wrote 50,000 words outright without any real thought as to where the story was going. 50,000 words with no chapter breaks that later had to be broken up into meaningful sections. With the chapter outlines now in place it is easy to organise the story as I write and to produce one chapter a day as against meeting a word count target. I guess we learn as we go along.


Sneak peek from Chapter twenty-three

Mick thought she’d been about to say something about God’s will and was pleased she’d left him out of it, because he didn’t believe in that rubbish. He didn’t mind people going to church and following whatever religion they pleased, if it brought peace into their lives, but it wasn’t for him. He’d seen too much of the downside of it, of hypocrisy and people hurt over differences of opinion, to set his cap at one or the other. His old mum and dad had raised him Methodist and did the best they could to build a faith in him and they meant well, he knew. It didn’t do them any good in the end either, living out their older years on the dustbowl they called a farm, believing to the last their prayers for rain would be answered.  They were good people, but religion hadn’t helped them when they needed it most, not in a physical sense anyway. He couldn’t say whether their faith helped them in other ways he couldn’t see. He hoped it had.