36,000 words and counting

My first piece of news and maybe the most important to some readers, is that I’m making very good progress with my latest Pitkirtly novel (‘As Yet Untitled’ – I doubt if that will be the final title by the way, although I suppose it’s an option but maybe a bit too literary!). I’ve reached my Camp NaNoWriMo target of 35,000 words since the 1st of July, and added another 1,000 today. This is one of the Pitkirtlies that writes itself, so I just need to sit back at the computer and let the words flow through my fingers. Not really! But I am enjoying it so far and at this rate I think I should be able to finish it during my holiday week in mid-August.

(obligatory Camp NaNo completion badge)

In case anybody is wondering, Camp NaNo is a spin-off from the November writing challenge, National Novel Writing Month, in which the target for everybody is set to 50,000 words. In the Camp version, you can choose your own target so naturally I chose a target of fewer words, to allow for summer distractions. Another feature of Camp is that you inhabit a virtual cabin and can have chats with the other people in your cabin. It’s more fun if you’ve ‘met’ some of them already, but it’s also interesting to chat to some new people.

Thanks to everyone reading this who downloaded either of my two historical novels while they were available free. I will probably do this again around Christmas if I remember. There were lots of downloads in Amazon stores all over the world, in fact I think it’s the first time I’ve ever seen any results from the stores in Mexico and Brazil. I realised while I was watching the bar charts grow bigger that what I really wanted to achieve when I made them both free was for more readers to get hold of them and give them a chance, and I definitely succeeded in that.

Thanks also to all the many people who have bought ‘Unrelated Incidents’.  It has been amazingly popular and well reviewed.

Apart from letting you know my progress on Pitkirtly XIX the reason for writing a blog post just now is that I’ve been waiting all day for some flooring fitters who were supposed to be fitting my new kitchen vinyl, and I’ve now gone from mildly irritated about it to ‘ready to rant’ – so writing this post has just postponed the evil moment when I navigate to Twitter, which is quite good for ranting on and sometimes even produces results. But for a writer, no experience is ever wasted, so I can foresee that in Pitkirtly XX (which isn’t even a twinkle in my eye at the moment) a carpet or vinyl fitter might have to come to a sticky end.