In my usual way, I am being far too harsh on myself. Today I hit the 30k mark but I know I’m five thousand words behind where I expected to be. If I had kept the marker at 50,000, as is the goal for anyone else doing the National Novel Writing Month challenges then I would be well ahead of the curve, both for my target and for anyone else involved. I feel like I’ve lost a lot of traction and I’m going to struggle to make it back.
It’s funny to me that it’s the weekends, when you would think I have the most time, that I could get this writing done. That’s simply not what happens. My weekends are full of great things but it doesn’t leave enough time for me to disappear off and write for a couple of hours.
Let’s keep in mind that I’m doing it, I am looking after myself and that there is no obligation here except the one in my own head. Set it free.

I’ve recovered from the position I left myself in yesterday, which is an incredible personal achievement considering how busy I’ve been all day. I don’t know how much of Chapter Seven will remain because even as I was putting it together it felt like filler but it’s all working towards something. At the end of this month, I’ll have a first draft and can go from there. There are going to be some days when it feels like I’m squeezing words out of my brain just for the sake of it.
I’m at 24,015 words.
It’s time to kick back, watch Sonic and switch my brain off until the morning.

Well, I’ve fallen behind. It was only a matter of time. I have been doing well for a week to keep up with my insane expectations but I’m calling it a night at 2,400 words. I’m too tired and I shouldn’t have had three beers before trying to make the last thousand words, while on a Zoom call and with a film on. This has been a learning point. I’m off to bed. Tomorrow, I catch up.

I started out well. Got over a thousand words done after my morning exercise but before work, but then the day got away from me.
So I am now up until at 11pm, drinking white rum and making my wordcount because I am insisting on getting this done to my own goal, rather than the 50k that is standard for NaNoWriMo.

Fun story. I left my notes in my office this morning and started writing what is actually Chapter Eight. It doesn’t matter because they’re about different characters and all slot in around each other but it made me think when I did check where I was supposed to be going in this chapter and realised I wasn’t supposed to have got to it for two days. Either way. Wordcount done. Bedtime.

Well, I feel like I’ve cracked it. I’ve often said that I do my best work before 9am and that was certainly the case today. I got up at six (very quietly because it’s a Bank Holiday and I don’t want to be killed), worked out for half an hour, showered, dressed and wrote two thousand words in an hour. I then took a break to do some work and came back in this afternoon to finish up my thoughts.
Chapter Five sustained the Mexican Standoff that I left the characters in at the end of Chapter Four, and I was pleased with how the tone held out. Everything is now in place for the adventure to begin for my two main characters. I keep checking back at the Story Circle I’ve drawn up for it and thinking about where everyone will be by the end of it. I’ve only written up my plan to Chapter Fourteen but am planning thirty chapters so there’s room for it to breath and for me to feel out where it should all go.
For now, I’m a happy man.

Well, I’m still to learn from the last few days. Over the Easter weekend, it has been difficult to carve out an exact time to write. I know that I can get a thousand words done in half an hour if I really set my mind to it and there isn’t much outside research that needs to be done. At the absolute maximum, the three thousand words I want to set down each day should take me three hours. A thousand words an hour seems reasonable. That being said, there’s a lot of outside research and consideration in this one.
Today was a fortunate break where the whole chapter I was writing was a study of a particular character in a particular situation so there was very little outside influence involved there. I got a thousand words done this morning when I got back from my kayak trip and then I left it until 10pm to start writing again. That was after half a bottle of wine. I got two thousand words written in forty minutes. A lot of that won’t make the first edit but at this stage it’s just a case of getting everything down and worrying about the order later.

If anyone is reading these in order, I suppose it can seem flippant the way I talk about the form that it has taken. I will tell you that I have spent months planning this, mostly in my head, and have the general arc down. I like to give some mystery to myself as I work on each chapter but there’s a definite guideline for each of them. I tend to put a bulletpoint down for each thousand words I want to put into a chapter.
No spoilers but today’s three were escape, run, hide. It sounds simple enough but from there I could fill in enough to make the word count. Everything else is a consideration for a couple of months down the line when I can dare to look at this manuscript.
For now, I just need to get it done!

Another late start, I left it until after dinner to get any writing done.
Chapter Three was a complete departure from the characters that I had introduced in the previous two days/chapters so it was an easy roll into the world of the chocolatier and a chance to get some outside ideas down on the world that I am building out.
I’m now at 9,000 words and getting to grips with some of the jokes, references and symbols that could be repeated down the line. As much as I love to plan these things through, it’s strange the places the mind goes to once the flow of words is coming. It’s also a welcome distraction as I am waiting on news back on something that I wrote previously and have high hopes for an a high opinion of. If I’m writing something new then it lends me an air of protection against my previous work. With everything new that I write, it feels like a step closer. I’m learning all the time and today I learnt that the scientific name for a sucker fish is a plecostomus.

Having struggled to reach my target yesterday, I was pleased to find the time today to get a chunk of writing done and am now at the six-thousand word mark, which is just scratching the surface but is at least still on the target for the rest of the month.
My plan is to write one chapter a day (making each chapter approximately three thousand words) as it feels like a clear cut off point each day. I definitely work better in the morning than trying to drag myself over the finish line later in the day. I wrote about 3,700 words today and the easiest part of it came in the 3,300 I wrote earlier in the day than the final portion I decided to put in after dinner and a couple of beers.
I had to do a decent amount of research (mostly the very legitimate historical source Wikipedia) to find out about the Nazis at the top of the pile, those who Hitler trusted. I’m yet to even introduce my two main characters. It felt necessary to set the scene historically which has now been done.
Tomorrow, we delve into the exciting world of chocolate production.

It’s been a month or so since I updated my blog. It felt like a good time to go for it as I have been bitten once more by the writing bug.

For April 2021, I will be attempting something stupid, a 90,000 word first draft of a novel that I am currently calling Death By Chocolate. It’s based on the Nazi plan (recently uncovered) to kill Winston Churchill by planting an explosive device inside a bar of chocolate. Apparently the old dog had a sweet tooth.
While there are elements of historical fact in there, the story itself is fictional and follows the unlikely pairing of a Belgian chocolatier brought in to design the chocolate and a young Jewish girl on the run who is mistaken for his assistant and forced into the Wolf’s Lair (that’s what Hitler completely unironically called his base). It’s a dark comedy in the same realm as my previous historical fiction piece, The Counterfeiter of Auschwitz.
I’ve come to realise that this period of history interests me massively and there remain a wealth of stories from that time that are still being uncovered and I am delighted to research and write them.

I hope one day to be able to share it but for now, that’s all you’re getting. I’ll update as often as I can on where I’ve got to in the writing process.
Today I’m calling it at 2,280 words. It’s been a long day and I spent upwards of nine hours staring at a screen for work so the thought of doing anything else was already a lot. Either way, it’s a good start and I hope to get ahead of my planned 3,000 words a day this weekend to get this draft done by the end of April. It’s a lofty ambition but if there’s anyone stupid enough to give it a go then it’s me.

Today is my birthday.
For months, in lockdown, I’ve been working on an album, my fourth, and it seemed like today was as good a day as any to allow it to see the light of day.

How Do You Feel? comprises of ten songs written over the last fifteen years. It’s entirely possible that could be a person’s lifetime. For me, it represents the time during which I have been writing songs. The fact I was able to dig all the way back into those dusty Schiernecker archives and pull these songs out suggests one of two things, I haven’t developed as a songwriter in any way, shape or form or I have a level of consistency to my work that many artists strive for.

I suppose the key thing across these songs is the change in subject matter. I went through a stage where I thought that all rock songs had to be about one of the three things defined by Ian Dury in 1977.
Some of the later songs that make up this album (later as in I wrote them later rather than they are later tracks through the album) are about such varied subjects as trains, escalators and consent.

When I was eighteen/nineteen, I was in a very unsuccessful (even by our campus standards) two/three man band, The Consequences. At least one of those songs is on this album and I send my love to Marc and that time I upset all the twirleys and we were asked to leave through the tradesman’s entrance.

It’s also possible to track various relationships, romantic or otherwise, through these songs. While things may have changed and my involvement with those individuals may have fallen by the wayside, I hope it’s with a sense of warmth if they can sense their signature on a song.

Aside from that, I wanted to do this for myself. The last year has been tough and having projects to focus on has been a little wonder. I have no intentions with this album aside from doing it because I can. It might not be perfect, but it’s mine.

How Do You Feel? is available to download now through Bandcamp and will be on Spotify in the coming days.