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It’s that time of year again, where we all go nuts and try to write 50,000 words in 30 days.  I did it last year and loved it, so I’m having a go again this year.  

But this year, I’m doing it all a bit different.

In honour of two of my favourite authors, Robert Rankin and Neil Gaiman, I’ll be doing it with a pen and paper (it also gets me away from the computer and this darned distracting interweb).

I was a bit unsure of this approach at first – how would I cope without being able to check my tweets every five minutes?

As it turns out, it was great, but it still left me with a couple of unresolved issues.

Firstly; which type of pen to use?

I met Robert Rankin a few years ago when he was one of the speakers at a comedy writing workshop. Here he espoused the virtues of the Bic Biro.  For him, no other pen came close – he even complained when I asked him to sign my book with my fountain pen.  

No such complaints I feel would issue forth from Mr Gaiman, who takes writing with an ink pen to a whole new level.

So what to do? Easy – 25000 words with a Biro, followed by 25000 words with my trusty parker fountain pen (I think a straight ink pen is probably a bit ambitious for someone as clumsy as me). 

Sorted.

My second, and possibly more significant quandary, was what to write.  After much deliberation (more than was probably necessary) I’ve decided that, rather than go for a straight novel, I should try something a little different.  

I went up to London last week to the very cool Tuttle Club at the ICA (see me here at the bar getting a coffee) and met a very splendid man who goes by the moniker of Sizemore (he’s the one in the checked shirt, sat down).  He told me about a project he’s working on which inspired me (along with Adrian Mead’s very excellent Making It As a Screenwriter) to write something for television.

So what I shall do for NaNoWriMo is write out a six episode TV series in long hand prose, with the intention of then adapting it directly to screenplay format afterwards.  

I’ve done all the calculations to try to keep me on track both with NaNoWriMo itself, and the pacing of the screenplays.  It’ll be a six chapter book, with 8500-9000 words per chapter; each chapter = one episode. I’ve no idea if it will work, but I’m 1758 words in so far (roughly, manual counting is a pain) and all feels good.

See you on the other side… and good luck to @missread, @ricgalbraith, @warriorgrrl and @splinister and everyone else doing it.

(Yes I know, I’m halfway through Return to Earth draft 2 but I’m following Adrian Mead’s advice and trying to get a wider variety of work into my portfolio – and I have no TV scripts in the bank at the moment)