At 00:01 on 01/11/2013 there I was, Scrivener all fired up with a new project file open. Lovely blank space on the screen. I gamely sipped at some camomile and honey tea and set fingers to keyboard at last.
Not much happened. Almost nothing, in fact. A sort-of start. Was it tiredness? was it the cold that hit me the weekend before and has been a sod to shake off? Was it any number of distractions? Who knows and it doesn't matter. I saved at '184 words' feeling every single other unwritten word settle on my shoulders.
"You'll do better tomorrow," said I, ignoring the social calendar elephant in the room: the best friend on her way from Cornwall. Let's call her The Marquise, just because. When one's friends live far away, one tends not to be able to rearrange plans and she was coming up on Friday night and I couldn't blow her off just for Nanowrimo.... could I?
No, I couldn't. Really. Honestly. Besides, she might be able to help brainstorm...
Friday night was therefore a writing write-off, but food at Carnevale was great (there are few things in the world not improved by a good panisse, baba ganoush and tomatoes in my opinion)... tea at home yet nicer and to cut a story short, we were up til 1am.
Saturdays are writing days for me. Yoga first thing gets my mind active and calm for a long stint in a coffee shop somewhere. 2nd November should've been foundation laying... but there was a reason The Marquise was up from Cornwall.
This:
By the way: Butterbeer is just cream soda and the gift shop is a shrine to Mammon but the HP stuff itself? Awesomebeans.
I'd decided to do something multi-generational with the Nano Novel for a sneaky reason: if I got writer's block on one time period, I could just go to another for a bit. It's an efficiency thing, ya dig? On the train The Marquise and I came up with some 'anchor' events/years to hang the story on, trying to avoid cliches. Wat Tyler, the Great Stink, Oswald Mosley were all suggested... but I felt something was missing. I needed things I already knew a little about to avoid wasting precious time on research. Naturally my thoughts turned to this pocket of Central London which has hosted my family for centuries... I could do this...
Feeling and looking sickly (have I mentioned?) I slouched back home from Euston and as I stood on that Northern Line platform amongst the early Saturday evening crowds, a flash of inspiration finally struck me. I had the basic notion of my story:
The tale of a family/property in London around the census-taking time periods.
Genius, I thought. I'd have ready-made documentation to refer to, a place I'm intimately familiar with geographically and emotionally... a ready-made structure for the novel itself.
And I got home and did... nothing. The Dreaded Lurgy had me in its grips. I was cheesed off to miss the rest of the evening with the Marquise and the group of friends. No way I was getting anything written, though the cogs in my mind had started turning.
Sunday though, was just a war of bloody attrition. Procrastinating thanks to yoga, food, laundry, internet... I finally started to work and found... my computer wouldn't respond. Probably something to do with the antivirus scan but also some issue with Scrivener - I had Walking in the Shadowlands open as well and apparently lil' netbooks don't like that.
I gave up. Well, I mean, I did research online about the censuses and the history of census-taking (you'll be unsurprised to learn that the great administrators, the Romans, came up with the word though didn't invent the actual idea of census-taking)... I got sucked into some initial research on Gainsborough Studios, then outright distracted by my own genealogy on Ancestry.co.uk.
I couldn't even think of a family name for ages. My brain would not work the way I needed it to. Soup was clearly needed, so I wasted more time making and then eating a big ol' lot of veggie soup.
A few more ideas were forming and even a few characters presented themselves, but I could't get to bloody writing. Nanowrimo is all about getting the words down... I'm nowhere near the kind of daily word count I need and the more I fall behind each day, the tougher it will be to catch up.
I can't help feeling like I've failed already... but on the plus side, the family is called Bright until a daughter marries an O'Toole, the house has an address, I have the beginnings of a family tree stretching from 1805-2011... and an antagonist in the form of William Edwin Bright.
It's not enough and it's not much but... it's better than I was expecting given that everything above excepting the Marquise and Potter? Excuses, just excuses. This week will be better, I'm sure...
Word count at 23:59, Sunday 3rd November 2013: 2582.
Clare will be taking part in NaNoWriMo 2013 and is being sponsored to raise money for Radio Lollipop.
You can sponsor her at any time at: http://www.justgiving.com/clareprsnanowrimo
For more information on the Author: http://nanowrimo.org/participants/clare-worley
For
more information on Radio Lollipop: http://www.radiolollipop.org/
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more information on NaNoWriMo: http://nanowrimo.org
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