I have five mins spare to sit myself down and quickly get this typed up, I've been meaning to do this for a few days now, but you know what it's like, you make a plan of things you need/want to do but they end up going out of control.

Okay, the latest on the writing side of my life... well I managed to write 50,000 words for Nano, the write a novel in a month. As you can see above, I now have 56k words, I still have a few chapters to complete it, hopefully, it'll be around 70k when I'm finished. I know what some of you are thinking, well she ain't done, it ain't complete. The target was to get 50k words written in a month for a novel, so yes, I did do it... and I must admit I'm dreading having to edit it!

My other novel Barry, one of the novels I'm writing for the Novel A Year comp, is coming along great, 40k of that one done, and I have the rest of the chapters sorted for that. This novel I started writing ages ago, well before NAY. But no matter how hard I tried, I couldn't get it finished. This time round, well apart from the first few chapters it's a completely different story to what I had first written and it seems to be writing itself now. At times I feel as if Barry has taken over me and he's writing the story the way he wants to do it. I have high hopes for this one, a friend of mine said the story is too sick to get published... I'm gonna have to prove him wrong.

And my third novel, The Hell of War, yup, it's at a stand still. This is my second novel that I'm doing for NAY. I ain't worried about not finishing it, I know I will, I just want to get Barry finished first, then I can put all of my energy into the war story. I've done a lot of research about this, first world war, and I have learned quiet a few things, I stil have more to learn though.

I'm also still editing my short stories, I'm planning on getting as many as I can published next year. I want to push myself further next year with my writing.

I've been writing a screenplay for a horror movie on and off with a good ole friend of mine, well a bloke I ain't met, we only know each other through a writers site, anyways, I'm hoping to get that finished next year. Finding time for us both to work on it is pretty hard... but we will get that done.

Well that's basically it with my writing... latest publications are in two anth's, more details can be found here on my website.

I better dash now... tatty bye for now.

I'm so impressed with your output. Did you find the contests helped? What was it about them that made the difference?
I loved this post, BTW, so positive.
Happy Holidays Claire!!

Hi there, yes, I'd say the contests helped keeping my drive to write going. Before the contests I'd look at my pc and think stuff it, I'll do some writing tomorrow... but with the contests when I said that to myself I'd argue back and tell myself I need to get it done. What made them different... it's not because it was a contest, I think what helped me was having a deadline, that really made me push myself. I kept track of how many words I wrote each day, before I went to bed I'd compare how many I'd wrote and if I thought I hadn't written enough I gave myself a target to reach for the following day, which worked pretty well... apart from the odd days when I couldn't seem to write much.

Happy Christmas to you. :)