Momentum, you gotta have it. If your team struggles throughout the season but finds a run of form late on, it has momentum which will serve them well in the play-offs when the long-time leaders are faltering and vulnerable. If that hill ahead seems steep there’s only one answer – build up speed and attack it. If you want to win the long jump contest you don’t saunter up to the take-off board.

As most writers will know it’s National Novel Writing Month. And every blogger/writer blogs about it. You have to write 50,000 words of anything at all to be a winner. To have any chance of doing this you need to build up momentum.

I have it finally, I have momentum. But I’m bang in the middle of a first draft and I’m not going to get sidetracked. But in the spirit of Nanowrimo I’m going to throw myself into my WIP with a view to adding 50k words to the approximate* 30k words already in place. If all goes to plan, well, the first draft will be at or nearing its conclusion.

And I’m pretty confident as I’m really enjoying this project – the previous, aborted one not so much. Set mainly in West Cork it tells of an old building, its history and that of its various inhabitants, one or two of whom seem to wish to hang around long after their time. And West Cork is an easy location for the introduction of a little Celtic mystery.

I have the rest of the story, the build-up of suspense and the drawn-out denouement broadly in place though I’m not, and never could be, an outliner. To me the fun in writing is seeing where the story and the characters take me, always within the necessary broad parameters.

And I’m hitting November running with recent early mornings devoted to writing before work. My latest Couch to 5k running programme finishes up on Wednesday (of that more to come). I’m no longer coaching track & field. No family these days to distract so, no excuses!

As any writer will tell you, when going well writing is effortless. Half-awake the other morning I spent an hour writing a section about a bloke in a Darwin bar (yes it fits with the main story, honest) despite never having been to Darwin, and I rushed off to work thinking it was one of the best little pieces I’d written for a long time.

With all my best efforts to absorb best writing tips and practices, if you’re writing well all that goes out of the window. You just write. Certainly at rewrite/edit time one needs to be much more critical but at the moment it’s fun.

So best wishes to everyone doing Nanowrimo. I gather that some ‘proper’ writers are snooty about the whole thing, maybe perceiving hordes of the great unwashed invading their precious territory. One of the best defences I’ve read is this by the excellent Catherine Ryan Howard.

*approximate as I’m handwriting this first draft.