Tuesday, December 01, 2015

National Novel Writing Month - Royal Style!

Yikes, it's been a while since I updated this blog!

Since I started this blog in 2005 I always envisioned it as a place to vent my frustration with royal coverage, to add my own satirical viewpoint to royal news and also to make informative posts that people would enjoy. Each year the amount of posts goes downhill. I feel guiltier and guiltier knowing that I am letting this blog languish. I make a vow each year to change that but...it doesn't change.

What can I say? Life gets in the way.

There is always a nagging feeling that I should get back to it. For the most part I find royal news to be relatively uninspiring. I think that blogs like mine, which provide commentary are simply not interesting. Who wants to listen to someone rant? People prefer blogs that deal with royal clothes and jewels and that's OK. But I do find it frustrating at times and I feel as though I can't keep up.

I've been focusing more on writing fiction. I did a few blog posts featuring my work in progress 'The Kidnapping of Princess Alexandra'. I took the work down, mainly because I did not feel that the posts did the storyline justice, it was too distracting and after a while I didn't get the point of doing it any longer.

Instead, I signed up for National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo for short). Each November, participants are challenged to write 50,000 words in 30 days. If you have never heard of it, here's a link. Let me tell you, it is not for the faint of heart. The idea is to simply write whatever you want, without editing yourself and see where the story takes you. Nothing is scarier than starting with a blank page. Even scarier is throwing most (if not all) of the work I had already written out the door and started from scratch. It forced me to focus on the story, take it in a different direction and all sorts of storylines started to pop up, things became clearer and also more confusing too. But I loved the challenge of NaNoWriMo and finished my 50K words ahead of schedule. Here's my Winner badge to prove it.




That's about all you get. Well, that and a PDF of a winner certificate to fill out. Oh yes, and bragging rights. Oh, and the satisfaction of having actually completed something. Which I would say is far better than winning money but that would be a lie.

Right now I have a 50K work in progress, multiple story-lines I didn't have before, a beginning, an ending but a very (very) disorganized middle. Instead of posting the work in progress here, I have started posting it on a site called Tablo.

Here is the link to the story: The Royal Correspondent


Feel free to follow along for the ride!


© Marilyn Braun 2015

Thank you for enjoying this article. If you use the information for research purposes, a link to credit the work I've put into writing it would be appreciated.

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