Writing Updates - NaNoWriMo 2020 - 'What I Want to Know'

Courtesy of NaNoWriMo.org

It's ten years since I did my first NaNoWriMo. That's National Novel Writing Month. Only it's not. It's a challenge based in San Francisco in the USA. But as lots of people accept the challenge of writing a novel in a month from various countries, it's really International Novel Writing Month. But who cares?   The result was an 80,000-word novel called 'Festival of Lights'. I just gave ebooks to my friends. Some of them liked it very much. I wrote a few more after that. I finished another novel a few years later called 'The Wife of Abraham'. That was an 80,000-word novel too. I haven't shown that to anyone. Yet. It's a love story set in Biblical times. Every Christian and Jew knows that Abraham and Sarah were one of the ideal couples in the Bible. Nearly as ideal as Joseph and Mary. They had a long marriage and stood by each other through good times and bad. But it's often overlooked that Abraham had another woman. Her name was Hagar. She has often been dismissed as a mere servant, someone who was used as a stand-in or a surrogate for Sarah, who was barren. Hagar was much more than that. She was the first woman in the Bible after Eve to have conversations with God. She even had her own name for God. She called Him 'the One who Sees me'. The more I read about her, the more interested I became to tell her story. I really should edit that and try to get it published. Maybe. Would anyone out there be interested in a Biblical romance? Perhaps.

I just added the word count for my latest effort 'What I Want to Know'. I found a nice word count meter on a site called Language is a Virus. It's a story about five northside Dublin girls working out their destiny. It's set in 1989. I was living in Dublin in 1989. I've used lots of happenings and stories from my life in those days to make my novel interesting. But anyone reading the book (if I show it to them) can take it that while I may have drawn inspiration from my friends and our stories together, these characters are works of fiction. They may be a blend of some of my friends but each one is unique and bears no resemblance to anyone I know living or dead et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, as King Mongkut used to say. He was the King of Siam played by Yul Brynner in 'The King and I', the Hollywood musical co-starring Deborah Kerr. The scriptwriter used to have the king waffling on and saying 'et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.' That's writers for you. The real King Mongkut probably never said anything of the sort. Mrs Anna Owens the 'English' governess wasn't English either. History has revealed that she was Anglo-Indian and a bit of a chancer. But the story was interesting and somewhat romantic.

Would you like to see my book? The one I'm writing at the moment called 'What I Want to Know?' Do you like the cover? I designed that with a little help from Canva.

Thanks to Canva for Design Help

I wrote a novel last month on a site called Gothnowrimo. That's a forum that encourages writers to write a Gothic novel in the month of October. I wrote a historical novel set in a hill station in India. I called it 'Ravenswood Mahal'. I had a lot of fun writing that. I showed it to my friend Anne who lives in Australia and she told me she enjoyed it. Once this month is over, I'll have to revise and edit a fair bit.