“Grace, Heaton and Silk” is a tale of two people and their cat and the adventure they have due to the things in the hedge. It’s not literature by any stretch of the imagination and the tone is fairly light, so I wasn’t sweating blood to make every sentence better, more evocative than the last.

It is 55,000 words, though, and that’s a lot more than I imagined I would write in one month.

NaNoWriMo is a terrific idea for those who have ever had the urge to write something – and that’s most people, right? Personally, I feel the actual number of words written isn’t too important; it’s just a notional target to aim at to keep you going. It’s not even a novel (the ‘No’ in NaNoWriMo) by most definitions and that nomenclature is too pompous a description if you’ve done it right. And doing it right, crucially, is about sticking your inner editor in a box and writing every day for a month; spurting out your creative thoughts and not worrying if they’re good or not. As far as a novel goes, it’s a first draft. At best.

That’s the part that I enjoyed: writing every day. Well, mostly enjoyed. It was a lot, lot harder to do than I would have expected.

I’m also an idiot about anything I care about. If I care, I get stressed. If I get stressed, I go for beer. Too much of that in November. But now it’s December so I can try to stay in more – besides, I can’t play Arkham City, my “well done me”, in the pub. Sorted. I also haven’t read anything fictional for a month, afraid of influence, stealing by osmosis and, primarily, realising how poor my own writing is by comparison. So I have a lot of comics to read, too.

Two details stick with me about the experience. One is the name of a character, a dog. It’s the only character whose name is the same as the character she is vaguely based on (other characters are incorrectly recognisable to anyone who knows me, though Heaton Bairstow is very much templated on me; write what you know!). I couldn’t change it – nothing else would fit, and once the character was there, it  was set in stone. The story made the choice for me. A very curious feeling – moreso than realising Heaton had hair (I don’t) in chapter one, then finding out that was quite an important teeny detail in chapter 16.

The other detail was the Day of Doom; another aspect that revolved around a name. I’m obviously obsessed. 26th November and approaching the end, sure of hitting the numbers and “winning”, then stuck. I couldn’t name a starling. He was going to be Emirascenes, Duke of Starlings but it sounded too dark. I like “Emirascenes” and might keep that for something else, but “Duke of Starlings” was too Stephen King. I’d broached the subject on Friday night in the pub and a friend didn’t like it either – too Greek, apparently. He suggested something more in keeping with the shape of the flock, the way it morphs – Morpheus! Shudder.

Saturday I wrote 600 words and then stopped at the introduction of the starling. The bloody thing is in the tale for about two paragraphs but I couldn’t get passed it and dropped into a glum mood. Apologies to the Beloved for that.

Sunday, after a restless sleep, I awoke to Quintus Darius, Praetor of Starlings, accepted it and wrote 5,000 words.

Writing is a strange thing.

[Word cloud of “Grace, Heaton and Silk”; click to embiggen]

I had not appreciated how difficult writing 1,000 – 2,500 words, which seems to be my modal average, every day would be. On day 22 of that, I’m suffering physical fatigue; hands ache badly. Laptop keyboards are not useful for lengthy attacks.

But yesterday was good. It was the chapter I had been dreading. It’s all exposition, essentially, and my way around that was to present the information as extracts from a journal (as in a diary, not peer reviewed, edited, scientfic publication as the Beloved thought).  The good part of this was that it was all first person and dialogue-free, unlike the rest of the unlikely yarn. The bad side of it is that it was meant to be by a Victorian scientist in 1879. No time for lengthy research but thank goodness for Wikipedia.

By the end of the evening, which included a brief sojourn to the pub for a break and to figure out how to end the chapter, I’d written 4,000 words and completed the dreaded journal. I was quite light-headed.

And then the strangest thing happened: I became quite sad because, after 4,000 words of exposure, I quite liked Dr. William Henry Lansbury and, moreover, I was concerned about him and wanted to know how he would be. But in the story’s “now”, he is long dead. Gutted.

It will be curiously difficult today to get my 3rd-person narrator and main character voice back together.

I knew that journal chapter was cursed. Just didn’t expect it to be such a perverse one.

In fact, I stopped because I suddenly realised I was at a point where I needed to decide on whether some places were fictional or real. A relevant for the story reason, so I figured that was OK. And fictional is the decision by morning (influenced by real, of course).

It was a surprisingly enjoyable experience, thankfully. I’ve tried to lock away my “inner editor” and just write, pausing to correct incoherence or error in a sentence whilst pondering the next bit, which I figure is OK. And also had a mild hint of a “writerly moment” when I realised, somewhat to my horror, that one of the main protagonists, Heaton Bairstow, is a bit ginger! Oh, the humanity!

So: “Grace, Heaton and Silk” to be written in a month and then filed away to be read by but a select few. It won’t be good. But it must be finished!