9pm, 30th November finished the task. I’d like to say I wrote “The End” but I’d already done that and had to write a short epilogue.

“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]

Tags: Grace Heaton and Silk, NaNoWriMo, Writing