I’m writing a novel. There, I’ve said it - it’s public now.

In fact, it’s been public before. I first started NaNoWriMo in 2015, declaring I’d write this book (or at least 50,000 words of it) in November of that year. I did it too, managing 50,055 words or approximately 1,668 per day.

Then I kept going. This is apparently the right thing to do, but before too long (at about 80,000 words) I realised I had absolutely no idea where it was going. This stymied me for a while, and I decided to read up on outlining and planning.

I’ll talk more in a later post about how I originally ‘pantsed’ the whole thing, went on to outline, and some great resources for that - but for now just know that I went away and did that, and am now in the process of taking the 3/4 of a novel I already have and cutting, pasting and massaging the scenes I wrote before into the new skeleton.

I’m calling what I’ve already done ‘Draft 0’ as it’s incomplete and unstructured, but maybe it’d be fairer to call it ‘Draft 0.5’ or even ‘Draft 0.75’ since in fact I’m not changing a lot in the process of rearranging it.

And since public declarations help with this whole ‘being accountable’ thing, I’ve made a few before this blog went live. More on that later, also!

So look out for the first draft of ‘The Fairies Want Me Dead’ by Christmas 2018.