The first day.

Peachy: that was the first day. I finally managed 2,133 words which leaves me in good stead for the morrow ... or today if you're being pedantic.

A few mates decided to try their hand, too. Bartello (a renowned keyboard player), Kapitano (a renowned sage and songwriter), and KittyJ (a very dear friend from over the pond). I'd like to wish them well, and may they have hale and hearty word counts! ;)

I've finally worked out a working method. I'm using the stalwart 'Page four' to write and make notes; Firefox to grab stuff and images, and Office Picture Manager to look at them. Scrivener was great, but as it was a first beta I found it a little too buggy. I would have kept the whole shebang in yWriter 5 had I created all the characters, places, etc before the first. But as all I need to do is write, then Page Four is great. I've spent far too much time waffling on about writing software and not nearly enough time planning. Sadly, entirely my bad. Still in the long run it's not going to be a problem. Fiction is fiction no matter what it's written on.

The NaNoWriMo site is being really slow. Not surprising. I guess they didn't expect 148,892 authors to sign up! And, they say that generally it's only 2/3 of the final head count that sign up on the first day, which would bring the total of new novels (providing everyone finished, which is unlikely) to well over 200,000. The mind boggles!

Sinbad (Bruin Fisher) mentioned a NaNoWriMo piece on the BBC's 'Today' programme, this morning. I listened to it on the iPlayer and heard Ian Rankin and Fredrick Forsyth being interviewed (the last ten minutes of the show). They both said that NaNoWriMo was a good thing, and that provided you did all your research, world and character creation before hand, that there was no reason you couldn't write a novel in 30 days. Rankin then said he wrote the first 'Rebus' novel in 30 days, and Forsyth said it took him 35 days to write 'The Day Of The Jackal.'

Now I'm going to write a little more, then turn in a hit the sack.

Ave.