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.