I spent the weekend with other people’s stories, editing and trying to work out a running order for the Homespun eBook. It felt nice to sit with them and give them my full attention, which will hopefully prove motivational for getting on with my own stuff.

There’s a great selection of stories, featuring witches, princesses, selkies and manticores. And a surprising number of sheep. Well, I say surprising, but of course Book 5 of the 12 Books in 12 Months project – the fantasy one, closest to a fairytale – did in fact star a sheep. Perhaps sheep are the new brooding vampire hunks…

Anyway, there are some lovely stories, and hopefully it will all be done and uploaded for next Monday – although now I’ve put a date on it something will probably go wrong. She said, using the power of positive thinking… I’ll let people know when it’s available, it will be soon.

In other news, between that and work I haven’t been left with a whole lot of time for NaNoWriMo. What I’ve ended up doing with a couple of chapters is copying posts from the blog to my manuscript and highlighting them in green so I know I’ve to rewrite them. This means that I am ostensibly on target but that not everything has been written in November.

I appreciate this is cheating in NaNo terms, but at the same time it’s helpful to me to do – and to be fair, this isn’t a novel in November, its a non fiction recap of all the novels I’ve drafted since November 2010. Copy-pasting from the blog is helping me remember to include things that bothered me at the time, stuff I’ve since forgotten – and it’s helping me to keep on target even if it is just in a superficial sense, which is good for morale.

A word of advice before I leave though – if you are doing a novel for NaNo rather than a true life memoir, you probably shouldn’t boost your word count by copying in posts from your blog. It’s unlikely to make sense, for one thing – unless you blog from the perspective of the fictional protagonist of your story. And it will be mega confusing when you go back to edit in three months – a year.

You’re welcome.