It’s that time of year again, and I’m blasting through the first draft of a story that’s been eating my brain for the best part of a year. It’s nice to finally get it out of my head and see it coming to life on paper. I’m half way through the NaNo word count and about a third of the way through the novel, so it’s definitely happening.

As you’d expect, writing at this sort of speed, the quality is pretty uneven. There are some glorious bits that really make me laugh and I know they’re going to make it through to the final draft, but there are also some hideous bits (including the bit I’m finishing up at the moment) where I suddenly realise that I’ve got the character’s motivations all wrong, they’re total cardboard morons and deserve to be incinerated at once.

I’m going to doing an initial redraft over Christmas to knock it into readable shape, but I’ve got this tingly sense of ‘this is going to be something good’ that stops me from hitting the ‘delete’ button.

I stumbled across this article on Stephenie Meyer in The Times this morning and it made me smile. Given the massive attention her books have had in the States, it’s about time the UK finally sat up and took some notice of her.

Although I have to admit, it’s quite bizarre to be casually reading the paper and then suddenly come across someone you once spent time with in Madrid. A definite tea spluttering over the newspaper moment!

It’s been ages since it was updated. It seems like I’ve got out of the habit of blogging altogether as there’s too much I really can’t talk about. My job is pretty much off limits - too much confidential stuff there, and there are limits to what I want to say about my own family and children as they deserve their own privacy. My writing is going well but that has its own blog (which probably isn’t updated as regularly as it should be either!) and I haven’t really been doing much that would interest anyone (unless you have an obsessional interest in tumble driers or goats cheese - and no, not together!

So… what’s left to talk about?

NaNoWriMo is coming up in just over a month (was it really a year since the last one?) and I’ve had really cool and positive editorial feedback on the last book. They think it’s publishable (wooohooo!) so there’s loads of positives there.

On the negative side, we’ve just been allocated a duff social worker who really doesn’t seem to know what he’s doing. We’re trying to get reallocated before he lands us in a nasty mess as he’s the sort of person who leaps to conclusions and that’s not so far from ridiculous and untrue allegations. We’ve seen too many nice people get burned at the hands of social services, so we’re trying to head this one off at the pass. We’ve got a valid complaint of him overstepping the mark so far and hopefully that will be enough to get him taken off our case.

Fingers crossed.