NOW IT CAN BE TOLD!
Okay, now that the stench of potential failure and the embarrassment of even suggesting that I might be capable of such a thing has passed, I feel confident enough to make a small confession.
This year, and with the kind of unofficial and unaided approach that tends to see me through these things, I was foolish enough to attempt the NaNoWriMo 2016 Challenge to write a "novel" (or at least 50,000 words of something that might turn into a novel) within the month of November.
Although, to be perfectly fair, I've not really approached it their way. I'm not in any groups, haven't got any "buddies" (Lord help us), and I've ignored their continued requests for donations (A-hah...!). I merely arbitrarily picked their target and start date, and off I jolly well went, prattling along and churning out my nonsense simply as an exercise to discover or not I have the stamina or the mental capacity to one day try to go the full "nov..."
So, you might have noticed - you probably didn't - that I'd been rather less "active" on the "stringing a few inept words together" front over the past few weeks, but that wasn't because I'd become all antisocial, or decided that you weren't worthy, it was simply that producing a wodge of deathless prose in those quantities takes an extraordinary amount of your free time - especially when your free time is evenings, weekends, and the occasional early morning if you can be faffed getting up that early in the week.
Nevertheless... By Jove, I think that I may have actually been and gone and done it...!
Despite the fact that prose hasn't really been the strongest of my writing "things" in recent times, I seem to have managed to start thinking in that way again and created a string of several thousand words that, to me at least, aren't completely terrible to read.
Now, because it's me, I doubt that anything else is going to happen to those words other than the fact that they'll sit on a hard drive forever, but the fact is that they exist and I have, for whatever reasons, achieved whatever pointless goal it was that I set myself.
Huzzah!
This is a story that's been rattling around in my head for several years now, so I'm glad of the opportunity to finally make a proper start to it and prove to myself that, with a certain amount of focus, I can actually belt out a significant slab of prose after all those years of play-writing and (more recently) poems.
I fully expect to fail, by the way, but will be happy enough if I even get half way.
Meanwhile, the story itself is a small, multi-stranded, web of deceit in which several lives and fates cross in (hopefully) unexpected ways. In the end I'm aiming for a more psychological torment than action-packed thriller, so don't expect helicopter gunships or massive explosions...
Well, not unless I get weirdly sidetracked and end up including helicopter gunships and massive explosions after all...
I did have this rather bizarre notion, you see, that I could cheat a little and write a full-length novel by writing around a dozen short stories that happened to be linked in some tenuous way, not unlike that Christmas story I once knocked out in 25 parts on the blog one year. It was only whilst I was doing this that I realised that that's what chapters tend to be anyway; short stories that are part of a larger whole. The only difference I was trying was compartmentalising each segment and playing around with the notion of narrative time, neither of which are that innovative as ideas, but they did make climbing the word mountain at least plausible rather than seemingly impossible.
On a summer morning, a woman does the washing up at her kitchen window.
On an autumn weekend, a man heads out with a camera before dawn.
Overnight in a lonely office, a Detective contemplates his enforced retirement.
In an otherwise deserted factory, a Senior Executive tries to cover up her crimes.
The paths of these disparate lives will cross at terrible junctions, and murder, betrayal, fraud, and the events of a chequered past, will come back to haunt all of these people in one way or another, long after some of them might think that they had got away with it.
Because bitter people have long memories, and can carry grudges for a very, very long time.
To be fair, I did approach this little project as a type of bonkers literary therapy, and the subject matter was, in part at least, rather too personal to ever be considered for publication, but I have found the process extraordinarily cathartic and, in the process, have managed to deal with a few "issues" which have been bubbling under in my subconscious for far too long now.
My top tip from this month (actually half a month) of pointless madness?
If you have demons in your past that sometimes pop back into your mind, write them down and find ways to slaughter them - in a purely fanciful and literary manner of course. Even if those dark demons are still out there in the real world, somehow I have found that addressing them on the page, and finding ways of destroying them in fiction, just makes you feel a hell of a lot better about life.
I tell you, it works wonders.
Of course, whenever I do start to even consider that I might one day actually be able or allowed to publish some of my wordmongery, I find someone with my name
(or something very similar to it) is already out there as a playwright or novelist, and I start to wonder whether I might have to come up with a nom-de-plume.
Because, believe me, writing a poem or a play or, Lord help us, a novel is an absolute breeze in comparison to having to try and come up with one of those...
STATS:
November 15th, 2016 - Of the twelve planned "chapters" or "short stories", seven chapters "complete" to "first draft". The earliest incomplete chapter is five, and the latest "complete" first draft is chapter nine.
Ch 1 - 6021 Words; Ch 2 - 5828 Words; Ch 3 - 5783 Words; Ch 4 - 5470 Words; Ch 5 - 2264 Words; Ch 6 - 5462 Words; Ch 7 - 4961 Words; Ch 8 - 7066 Words; Ch 9 - 6479 Words; Ch 10 - 1112 Words; Ch 11 - 233 Words; Ch 12 - 162 Words.
Running total: 50841 words (+/- variations in word counting software) between 01 and 15 November - although most of the actual words themselves are probably quite dreadful it's been an interesting experiment.
NB - To not appear to be a proper swot, and not discourage any scribes still in the doldrums, I've been understating my word count on the "official" website - They still think I'm wallowing in the low 40,000s - the fools...!
The Autumn Tree’s chopped down
