Good Morning Starshine!

This being the first post in my new blog, I should probably set about telling the world what it's purpose is. Ink Blots is solely for everything writing related that I create or want to blog about; whether I'm ranting that I'm having writer's block, or a particular word just won't come to me, even if I've had the most brilliant idea, perhaps I have some extract I'm proud of to share with everybody. Whatever it is, it goes here. I realised that I don't really use my regular blog very much; and when I do I write, sometimes, quite a bit about writing itself. I admit that I haven't focussed much on my writing for the past two years - exams, study and exams have been the downfall of this particular past-time. I began to fear, mid-college year around April/May time, that my creative writing would or already HAD stagnated due to the way I've been moulding my writing to essay form, for whatever subject it's on. I was proud of my writing style; I always had been, it always effortlessly sounded like I'd written it when I read it back to myself. I don't want to lose that, and for that reason I started blogging again.

Well, with NaNoWriMo 2011 just around the corner (23 days, 21 hours!) I've decided that no matter how tired, grumpy, lose-the-will-to-live I get, I'm going to write my 50k of words this year. Every year, I fall down around the 12k mark. It's usually because I have a roaring good start, writing at least 4k in the first day because I'm so full of gusto. Then I'll write another 1.5k the next day. So I've hit almost 6k in the first three days. Then I think, I can afford to take a break. I'm ahead of where I should be! I fall behind for a few days, make up for it by storming ahead adding another 7k to my total and then... fizzle out. There is a certain point at which you lose interest in a novel you're drivelling out 1.6k words for every day. I know the idea is to get it written, but I always always can't help myself from thinking I'm murdering my plot, my characters, and doing them a disservice by writing utter shit. So clearly I need a change of mindset; NaNo is so that you get something written, no matter how under-developed your characters are, no matter how twisty and loopholed your plot is. It's about writing the words, even if they read back like something a ten-year old would write.