Writing Goal and Nano updates

5 Year Writing Goal: November update

I’m taking part in Misha and Beth’s Five Year Project and my five-year goal is to write a novel and get it published. This is my update on progress this month.

Nothing. Absolutely nothing. Absolutely NOTHING at all.

I hang my head in shame, but my excuse is that I’ve been concentrating on NaNoWriMo and on my Birkbeck assignments. So I’ve been doing plenty of writing, but nothing that is focused on my goal.

But there is good news on the NaNoWriMo front. Despite a shaky start, due to being AWOL on a walking holiday at the beginning of November, and despite an intervening illness that knocked me out and put me in bed for a few days, I’ve managed to catch up. By the end of today, I’m only 2,500 words away from my the NaNoWriMo target!

This year I decided to become one of the NaNo rebels. I’m not writing a fiction novel. Instead I am writing a book about walking along the English coastline. I’ve been thinking about this for a long time and have collected plenty of thoughts, facts and material. Now it’s just a question of getting it all down. And I’ve discovered I have almost too much for one book, as non-fiction books are usually shorter than fiction. I’ll have to see what’s left after a ruthless post-NaNo edit. But maybe there will be two books as a result of this month’s work.

I plan to self publish my walking book (or books), as I think it unlikely that any publisher will be interested. There are already many excellent walking books on the market and it’s a well-worn topic. But, in any case, I relish the opportunity to undertake a self-publishing project, taking a book from scratch to finish.

So glad I decided to do NaNo this year. I’m going to be a 50,000 word finisher double-rebel.

Author: Ruth Livingstone

Walker, writer, photographer, blogger, doctor, woman, etc. View all posts by Ruth Livingstone