I’ve been off school for four days now. The great thing about having this half term is that in theory I’ve got plenty of time to concentrate on my NaNoWriMo novel and still make time for schoolwork that I need to finish. Problem is, I haven’t done anything so far, except play The Sims. No plot-planning, no Music or Art homework.

NaNoWriMo is six days away, but, apart from a loose plot and one or two characters, I have no idea what I’m doing.

What it is, is simply a lack of motivation. I’ve been out of the writing thing for so long that, unlike last year, I’m finding it incredibly difficult to get back into things. So far, I’ve written out the entire plot (but with many holes) and finished just one full character profile. What I was planning on doing was getting at least three character profiles completed, rewrite the plot outline to fill any holes, and then create one of the spreadsheets I made last year to calculate the wordcount. Said spreadsheet would also be a chapter-by-chapter run-through of the entire novel which I would use to keep my inspiration and motivation.

That’s what I made last year, anyway. And I won last year, with over 80,000 words. This year, though, I barely have a complete plot, let alone a chapter-by-chapter explanation! I only know the names of three of the characters, and the personality of just one. I don’t know how long this story will go on for, or if it’ll even cover 50,000 words!

But, this could be a good thing, right? the whole point in NaNo is to just dive in and write, rightright? Just because the complete planning technique worked last year, doesn’t mean it’ll help this year, when I have more schoolwork to do and less motivation to do it. Just diving in and writing when I can may just spawn its own plot and characters – it may end up that I wouldn’t have had to do any planning!

But I don’t know. Hopefully I’ll get the motivation to continue planning later in the week, and on Saturday I’ll make sure to get something done before I start writing at midnight. I’m not sure if I should be worried at this point, though – the way things are going, it seems like writing this year will be completely different to writing last year, and there were many different things that helped me keep writing last year that I may not have this year. I really don’t want to end up giving up, but at the same time it won’t matter that much if I don’t win. It’s just the experience, right?

I forgot to mention; I got on Blogger yesterday and started up a new blog here. It’s a blog dedicated to the hobby I’ve been slacking off doing this summer; writing. It may interest you, it may not, but the idea is for me to record any of my thoughts and feelings about writing over there to help myself prepare for NaNo 2009 (which, I’ve decided, I’m definitely going to participate in, despite probably having too much homework to do from now on). I’ll write about my inspirations, my progress in planning my next novel, and any snippets or short stories I manage to write out of the blue. I’m not sure if I’ll end up writing to that blog more than this one, but I wanted to keep it seperate from my main site to avoid having to do all that crappy setting-up-a-subdomain-with-wordpress-installed stuff that I hate and usually give up on after a few days (Dudley Chucklesworth being an example of that). If Michelle can do it, why can’t I? (although, I refuse to use livejournal… ;S) And plus, y’all might get bored if I were to let my writing take over this blog, haha.

For one of my A Level subjects I chose English Literature. I did that because, apparently, I love reading, and, apparently, I’m good at the subject even though I thought I completely screwed up the final exam (you don’t know how worried I was about that result – I got an A overall). I didn’t do it because I wanted to read Jane Austen. In fact, I didn’t really want to read Jane Austen. I’m all for classic literature, but seriously, how boring does that book sound?

Usually I finish a book within a week or so. Less if I’m really engrossed in it. But this book took me over three weeks, and that wasn’t just because of the other work I had to get done. It really was that boring.

Includes some spoilers.

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