1760: The Storyteller will be Late

Those of you who have been following this blog for a while will know that for the last few Novembers, I’ve done my own private NaNoWriMo–style project: to write a novel (or, at least, something of roughly novel-length) in the space of a month. You can read previous attempts starting here, here and here.

Previous installments have varied somewhat in quality. This is at least partly due to the fact that I tend not to plan out pieces of creative writing in advance, and in all these cases made a deliberate attempt to “improvise” the plot as I went along. The philosophy of “just write” in other words; pretty much the guiding principle of this blog in general, only with rather more of a focus than usual. And that’s pretty much the guiding principle of NaNoWriMo, too; to get some creativity flowing, and to do the initial hard work of getting something out of your brain and onto the page in a structurally complete form. You’re a lucky person indeed to come out of something like that with something you’re 100% happy with, but it provides a good starting point to then go on and edit, polish and refine if you want to — or simply move on secure in the knowledge that if nothing else you’ve practiced and refined your craft a little.

Those of you who have been following this blog for a while will have likely noticed that we’re well into November and no new work of fiction is forthcoming. I’d like to apologise for that. It wasn’t entirely intentional; in fact, I was actually quite looking forward to firing up the fiction-writing engine in my brain — it’s been a while; about a year, in fact — and seeing what on Earth I could possibly come up with this time around. I’d even had a few concepts I’d been kicking around inside my head, but hadn’t decided on which one I really wanted to pursue.

So what happened? Well, largely a lack of awareness on my own part, to be honest; the first of November came during that period when Andie and I were doing a whole bunch of things — firstly, we went up to Scotland for Cat’s wedding, then came back again; then Andie had a delightful day in hospital (nothing life-threatening, I might add); then we went to London for the Final Fantasy concert Distant Worlds. At some point during that week, I completely lost track of what day it was — November 1 was the night of Distant Worlds, and much of our day was spent travelling, so starting a brand-new creative project was unfortunately top of my list of priorities.

But never fear! (At least, not about this! Sometimes fear is justified, like when you lift your toilet seat and find a man-eating spider.) I’m still going to do “this year’s” writing; it’ll just be a bit late. Quite a bit late, in fact; so late, in fact, that referring to it as “this year’s” might be a bit of a stretch: I’m intending to start it on January 1, 2015.

Why? Well, largely because I have “one of those things” in my brain — somewhat exacerbated by Andie, who is much the same — where I like dealing with nice round numbers (we both turn the volume up and down in increments of 5, and God help you if you set the temperature in your car to something ridiculous like 23.5°C) and starting things at natural starting points. Consequently, starting a month-long project on November 12 is absolutely unthinkable to me, and thus I can’t possibly start until the beginning of a new month.

So why January and not December? Well, December is that irritating month with Christmas in it, and such festivities have a habit of proving somewhat distracting to the creative process in my experience, so I figured probably safest to leave it for now and kick off the new year in style with a month-long creative writing project. New year, new beginning and all that; what better month than January to start something like this, really, when you think about it?

Anyway. That’s the situation, if you were wondering. If you weren’t wondering, well, now you know, and if you’re particularly curious about what I’ve done in the past, you may well now have three novel-length pieces of unedited prose queued up and ready to read from previous years’ projects. I hope you enjoy them as much as it is possible to enjoy something so rough around the edges.