Like Withnail, who went on holiday by mistake, I’ve begun waking up by mistake. At the crack of dawn. And it’s the bloody weekend.

Today, for instance, I woke at the rather tidy time of 5.55 a.m. (6.66 would have been better; spookier. Also, of course, impossible.) I’d been hoping to rack up 30K last night (in total obviously; I’m not that much of a maniac), but as I announced on twitter it proved a step too far:

So, 5.55 (or even 5.59. The twitter clock never lies). You’re awake, it’s a grey Sunday morning, there’s tea in the tin… oh bugger it. You might as well get up.

Boil the kettle, etc. Then get back in bed, where it’s toasty, and crack on with reaching 30K.

I made it! Hurrah!

I tweeted some more stuff about tea:

I made a fresh cup and I got back in bed and I carried on writing. Eventually, when my neighbours woke up, I had this to contend with:

But it takes more than a bit of insanely loud ear-splitting drilling to stop me these days. I’m a woman on a mission. (I like having a mission.) My mission is this: to deliver a first draft (to myself) by Christmas.

I have a few rules: the writing itself can be shoddy as hell, but it has to EXIST. What I mean is, no gaps of the ‘Chapter where something happens (not sure what)’ variety. It’s fine to leave continuity errors to sort out later (Scrivener comes into its own here: each document has a note card for mid-scene scribbling of things to remember), but in general I’m trying to solve each problem as it occurs. 

A large part of the novelist’s job is problem solving. In film terms, you’ve got to produce the damn thing before you pull out the megaphone and direct it.

You start out with this:

And you end up with this:

Or possibly this:

Image source

The main thing, with first drafts, is to find the story.

Image source

I’ve never been much of a seamstress (I can just about sew on a button) but, having been in a couple of pantomimes as a child, I’m familiar with standing awkwardly – like an upright chalk-outline – while somebody sticks pins in my clothes. (On a side note, I’ve just discovered, via this site, that I was in panto – Dick Whittington – in 1983 with the Chuckle Brothers’ brothers… Genuinely a brush with showbiz glory. The following year it was Wayne Sleep and the Golden Shot’s Anne Aston, who was well known for her boobs, apparently, although being 11 at the time I was unaware of my proximity to these famous assets.)

Enough of that. Although I am writing a book set mainly in the 70s, and if anyone watched Channel 4’s It Was Alright in the 70s last night – which really ought to be ‘all right’ as two separate words, Channel 4, if you’re interested – breasts were everywhere in the decade that taste forgot.

Just when you’re wondering, ‘why are there so many images in this blog?’ you go back and count them and, hey presto, there are sixteen of the buggers. One for each day of nano. See what I did there?

But, wait, you cry! There are only fifteen…

Here you go, pedant.