Week 4: NaNo grinds to a halt

Considering my prediction last week, this week has been surprisingly eventful. I managed to spend a few hours in Leeds at the New Writing North Northern Writers' Awards Fiction Roadshow on Saturday, soaking up advice and information about the awards themselves, how to edit your work to a suitable standard for sending out, and how to approach agents, as well as some glimpses behind the scenes of publishing. I feel slightly more confident about entering the awards again this year.

No submissions this week, that would have required a bit more coherence than I was generally able to muster, and only the one rejection, but I have got a couple of submissions planned for the coming week. Along the way I wrote a short story I didn't really mean to - I'm supposed to be writing a novel, if you recall. Sometimes, though, the story is just hammering on the inside of your skull, demanding to be written down, and if I could have written that many words in one day every day this month I'd have cracked NaNoWriMo about a week ago instead of being barely in five figures with only a few days left.

I also rediscovered a novel. By which I mean I looked in a file I hadn't touched since August 2012, wondering just how many words of that crime novel I'd written and if any of them were any good. The answer being about 45,000 and if I'd read those first few pages in a book I'd picked off the shelf in the local library, I'd have been hurrying over to the desk to get it stamped. Simultaneous joy at my (ahem) brilliance, and despair at having wasted four years not finishing the blasted thing. It's now been added to the (ever-growing) list of stuff I really need to spend some time on during this sabbatical/period of unemployment/temporary withdrawal from the rat race.

All this, and December is almost upon us. Time to buy some mince pies and limber up for a good Bah-humbug.