Month of writing dangerously

November is National Novel Writing Month—“Thirty days and nights of literary abandon”.

What? You’ve never heard of it? Well, hello—300,000 people around the world have signed up via NaNoWriMo, committing to completing 50,000 words of some work of fiction by 30 November.

And you’re looking at one of them.

I’m really not much of a fiction person, at least as far as writing goes. (Actually, aside from detective novels, I don't read much of it, either. Um.) It seems so…so messy, you know? Plus—there’s that whole issue of having to have a storyline. So I’ve always stayed pretty clear of it—aside from a couple of short stories and a novella that I wrote while working at the third-largest engineering company in the world and didn’t have anything to do for a few weeks.

But I had this idea about ten years ago, and then it kind of faded away. So imagine my surprise when around five weeks ago it just jumped up and whacked me all over the inside of my skull and demanded to be let out.

And if there’s one thing I’ve learned over the years, it’s this: if the voices tell you to do something, you may as well get on with it, because you’ll get no peace until you do.

This is going to be quite the challenge because not only is it, you know, fiction, it happens to be partly a police procedural, a murder investigation. Yes—the voices would tell me to write something that is completely plot-driven. And me great on character development but absolutely pooh on plot.

Oh—and it’s set in some yet-to-be-determined large city in the north of England. Maybe Manchester; more probably Newcastle-upon-Tyne. Neither of which I’ve been to. (But see above about the voices.)

Clearly I have a lot of research to do in parallel with this month’s efforts.

Anyhow, starting…well, yesterday, actually, I’ve got a document titled “untitled”, occupying my desktop alongside “Timelines”, “Character studies”, “Forensics and investigative questions” and so forth. And I have to drop approximately 1700 words per day into it.

Another challenge is to just throw those words out—I’m a hyper-critical editor of my work, and I have to turn that function off, or I’ll never make the goal.

I’ll update you periodically on my progress.

And, just in case—if any of my six readers has knowledge of investigative procedures, police corruption scandals, British social services, military CID (especially in the Royal Army) or the Newcastle library system, I’d really appreciate a little help.