NaNoWriMo 2011

      If you have been on my facebook page at any stage you probably know by now that NaNoWriMo which stands for National November Writing Month and it is a challenge whereby if you accept it, you are challenged to write a story in excess of 50,000 words in just one month and obviously being the month of November.

       Ever since I have been a kid I have been writing short stories, but unfortunately over the years I have lost so much of what I have written, so a few years back I decided to start typing up what stories I still had a well as stories I could remember, and of course I continued writing new stories too. I have also been posting these stories on-line.

      Even though I love to write short stories I have always wanted to write a real long story but until now I have not been motivated to do so, therefore I took up the NaNoWriMo challenge. The story I decided to write is called THE PATHFINDER MISSION, basically it is about a starship by the name of THE PATHFINDER, it is the end of the world and planet Earth is being evacuated, so The Pathfinder is charged with finding a new home for the human race.

      So for 30 days and 30 nights even though I have existed on Planet Earth I have been living aboard The Pathfinder. Unfortunately right from the start of the month I was behind on the daily word targets but I had always been fairly confident that I could catch up but when I got up on the morning of November 29th I still had 13,400 words to reach the 50,000 target. Up to this day I had only 3 days where I had written more than 2000 in one day, 2,500 twice and 2,300 once and with a 14 hour effort I got through over 7,500 words.

      I ended the story before the 50,000 word mark as I felt I that by going any further I was only dragging out the story, however I still had time to go so I wrote an introduction to the story to bring the word count up, and my validated effort reached 50,055 words therefore I am a NaNoWriMo winner.

      So many of you kept me motivated all month long even when I thought it was beyond my reach, so me being a winner makes all you guys a winner too. Thank you all so much for helping me reach a personal goal, and who knows Maybe I might just get to try this again next year.

      I have been posting the story in 15 parts on-line at short-fiction.co.uk where I post under the name 'actung'.

PLEASE READ THIS

      November may the month of NaNoWriMo, a month of writing that I am currently taking part in, but November is also the month of Movember, a month when men all over the place don weird and wonderful moustaches or facial hair in general for charity. This year I am taking part but since I already have facial hair I will give Movember a bit of a twist.
       Now I have been able to grow facial hair since I was 12, so when I was 18 I had a pain in me back side shaving so around about this time of the year in the year 1992 I began to grow a full beard. After about two weeks it began to itch and itch so bad that I shaved.  I started with shaving the cheeks and when I got to the chin I noticed that this part of the beard had never itched so I kept what was left and it has been there now for nineteen years which is more than half my life.
        So what I will do for Movember is give what facial hair I have a new designer look but only if I raise at least 150 for Irish cancer society. So the deal is that if I raise over 150 euro by midnight November 22nd I will go get the designer look the following morning, have photo's taken, post them to my facebook and use one as my profile pick.
       If you want me to give my facial hair a designer look then do what is said in the film 'Jerry Maguire' and SHOW ME THE MONEY. Come on people, who is gonna sponsor me.