Despite how this looks it’s actually not a humble brag, or a not so humble one, but yeah I wrote a Book once. This is more of a practice of one of the things I thought I would try with this new blog and that’s being more open… in some ways.

I’m normally embarrassed when I give something new a try (like a blog for instance) and hide it from all but a few friends. I’m not overly sure why but it’s probably a lack of confidence mainly, I guess I’m also afraid of being laughed at too. So I’m trying something new and that is sharing things from different parts of my life. I’m also trying to have more courage, for example I like to try and be funny but we all know attempted humour can bomb in a major way sometimes so I’ve decided I need to back my judgement and just post it, even if I might think it’s a little cringe worthy others may find it entertaining.

Also, like many, I have opinions on things but I tend to keep them to myself or just test the water a little before putting my thoughts out there but now I want to try and just share it and have a discussion about it. Because that’s the thing with me, I’m happy to have a conversation and to have my eyes opened maybe even resulting in me changing my mind on a subject. Though on the internet it’s sometimes hard to start a conversation as more often than not someone with an opposing opinion will come out swinging and abusing you for yours when infact you’d much rather a civilised conversation to find out more.

Anyway so I wrote this book and the reason I did it?! Just because.

There’s this thing called NaNoWriMo which stands for National Novel Writing Month and is now actually an international thing that happens every November where people attempt to write a novel in the month of November. For the purpose of this event they define a novel as being of at least 50,000 words.

I found out later that some people spend hours and hours preparing to write and planning their novel in the months leading up to November but I didn’t find out about it until a couple of days before it started. Though even if I had found out about it earlier I’m not sure if I would have planned it anyway or just winged it.

I can’t remember where I first read about it but I thought 50,000 words, yeah I could do that. I haven’t ever written anymore than a few hundred I think, and am actually not much of a reader at all with having only read half a dozen books throughout my adult life. But it was a challenge that I thought would be good just to see if I could do it. So I did.

I hit the 50,000 words late in November but got there and kept going a bit longer. I didn’t end up finishing the story off, mainly because I wasn’t entirely sure how to finish and then I tried editing it but editing is like reading a book except worse and as I said I’m not much of a reader. I found out that I do like writing though. Like I haven’t written another novel but I do like writing other things.

I realised at one point that the best thing about writing a book is that you you can make the characters do whatever you want and that’s pretty cool. It’s like day dreaming on paper, creating whatever sort of world you want, going anywhere you want and interacting with anyone you’ve ever wanted to.

Anyway, I recommend giving it a go even if you’d normally say I can’t do that, take longer if you need otherwise try to do it in the 30 days of November if having a deadline helps.