NaNoWriMo

Despite previously blogging to the effect that I was not going to do the NaNoWriMo thing; this year I am. My original plan was to be doing it in my motorhome somewhere near a beach in southern Spain, but what with one thing and another I'm still in Worcestershire.
Why do it? mostly because I had an idea, that's not so unusual, but if that idea gets connected with a character in my mind, and the character likes it, or at least reacts to it, then the next step is the keyboard.
There are some disadvantages, one being that 50,000 words is classed at success, 50,000 during November, that is. It's not the number that I object to, it's the mesmeric quality of a target.
If you join the web site, and fill in your totals now and again they ping up this nice graph that shows how you are doing. One becomes captured by the numbers. I have no idea how long this novel really should be, maybe 49,000, maybe 63,000, but there is every likelihood that by the end of November it will be 50,000. Given that most agents and publishers seem to expect adult novels to be in the 60,000 - 80,000 range, there is a sort of flaw in the NaNo concept, unless the Nano bit is about it being a small novel, or possibly it is a cunning ploy to keep most of this rubbish away from traditional publishing.
Anyway, there is it. About when we should have set off to Spain the area we had intended to head for had major floods, one of the contributing factors to not going, though there were others.
Right now, outside my window, the river Severn is over it's banks and as high as I have ever seen it since we moved here.


In 2007, in our old house we once had a major flood, (see picture, right). There is something reassuring about being able to  stand on my roof terrace in the new flat, and look at the water (see below), and think that it would take an unimaginable catastrophe for the water to get this high.

The novel is not about floods, it's much more scary than that, but I must get back to it, the numbers are calling.