So, on the 11th September, I had one of those, what-I-like-to-call, waking dreams. Not a dream when I’m awake, but the kind you get when you are just waking up, and that you manage to hold onto. Yes, it’s a mishmash of images and ideas, but there’s a hope it could be more. So once again I have decided to attempt NaNoWriMo. For those of you that aren’t sure what this is – it is basically a mad challenge to try and write 50,000 words of a novel in the month of November.

Now with a memory as poor as mine I sometimes wonder if I’ve heard or read my story ideas somewhere before, so I’ve decided to try Grammarly’s plagiarism detector because I don’t want the big bucks I’m sure to earn to be snaffled away in copyright court. Good news – it doesn’t even recognise my title as a real word!

Now I have a slight problem – there’s a whole month until November, and I still have two NaNo Novels not yet completed.

That’s where #NaNoWarmUp comes in. Kat Zhang, author of What’s Left of Me and Once We Were (The Hybrid Chronicles), and Savannah Foley, the author of Nameless and a number of other YA fantasy books have decided to host a warm-up for the main event. So instead of 50,000 words, October’s challenge is 25,000 words in the month.

I will be continuing my first person rewrite of Training Time (because I didn’t get very far).

Now, I believe the pace for completing this is around 800 words per day (as opposed to the 1667 for NaNoWriMo). But, thanks to Nicole sharing this link with me, I can mix this up a bit because of Susanna’s Pacemaker V.09. I thought I’d try the random word count option – so one day I might be attempting to write near the NaNo target and the next 55 words! Here’s the link to my proposed schedule here or in the table below. I’ll also be updating the blog widget with my progress, or lack thereof.

Good Luck to all NaNoWarmUp participants.

Thanks to Grammarly who provided me with a free software trial and who have sponsored this post – I always knew I was rubbish at commas!!