As we emerged, blinking, out of the first lockdown in July 2020, I stumbled across a group pf people who would change my life.

My lockdown had been both traumatic and dull – my mother died just days after it started, and we had to deal with the process of death, a funeral and probate lawyers when none of us knew what we could and couldn’t do. But my job carried on as before. I just turned up at my home desk every morning instead of heading into the office every few days. As the car (literally) mouldered, I found it hard to motivate myself to do much else.

Then, on the 7^th July I saw a tweet which would change everything. Someone mentioned an online writing community, a place where you could join a zoom call and sit in silence for 50 minutes, writing. Seemed a bit weird, but I was very used to zoom meetings. I clicked the link.

There was something strangely compelling about those early calls with the London Writers’ Salon. When I joined my first call on the 8^th July, there were about a hundred of us (I think), and the faces and personalities quickly became familiar.

I have been on pretty much every call since then, except on the very few days when I’ve been travelling. When I heard about the weekend calls I joined those, too.

At the time I was writing a novel – the second I had written for adults after getting a handful of books for teenagers published. The first book for adults had had some interest from agents, but I’d got discouraged and started a shiny new thing, and that too was sagging, about 40K words in. The writers’ hour gave me a regular space to find a rhythm to create. My earlier books had been written during a daily commute, and I realised I needed that discipline. So, from July last year I got up stupidly early, walked the dog, and was ready at my desk for the 8 o’clock words of wisdom and the growing community.

After a while I joined officially – becoming a patron and getting access to the group Slack channel. I watched videos and webinars, chatted to other writers, and slowly felt more and more absorbed by my new tribe. When my husband went away for a weekend in October I bought Scrivener and spent two days wrestling my manuscript into the package. The book was flying along.

The LWS slack channel has a critique group, and when I felt that my baby was ready, I offered it up to them. They came back with helpful suggestions and several offers of Beta readers which I snatched up. Another round of edits followed and I pulled together a list of agents I wanted to approach – seven in all. Within days I had requests for the full manuscript from four of them, and I held my breath.

While this was going on I started a new book, entered a few essay competitions, wrote a short story for the LWS anthology, and – scariest of all – took a redundancy package and stepped away from corporate life to write full time. It’s been a busy twelve months, even though I’ve barely left my desk.

I’d love to end this summary of the year by saying that an agent picked me up and negotiated a multi-book deal with a six-figure advance, but that hasn’t happened. I’m still hoping, sending out the queries and writing an even better book (70K words since going full time in April!). The LWS has shown me that I can always improve, that even when I get a knock back I can dust myself off and go again. I know that I’ll get there eventually.

I wish I could remember whose tweet I saw last year that sent me off down this path. I’d like to buy them a drink.

I’ve not added much here lately. For various – mostly family-related – reasons my writing has slowed over the last two years, and although I have projects in progress, I wasn’t making much actual, well, progress. I decided I needed a motivator, something to get me back in the habit.

My husband coaches teams to perform, and he has told me that it takes 60 days to form a habit. After that time you don’t need to remind yourself to do something, it just becomes part of you. I’d lost my writing habit, and I needed to get it back. In the past I’ve tried NaNoWriMo – National Novel Writing Month, where you set yourself the challenge of writing 50,000 words during November. That’s about 1,600 words a day, quite a lot if you have a day job, and it’s not really sustainable long term. I wanted something less stressful, something to be viewed as a treat, not a challenge. I decided to do #OctNo.

My plan for #OctNo, an entirely made up concept (but then we’re writers, we make up stuff all the time :)) was to do something to do with writing every day in October. I wouldn’t beat myself up about it, and I’d be very flexible on what I considered could be included. I gave myself the added incentive of posting my daily progress on Twitter. I reckoned that if I was writing, 500 words would be a good target. That’s about a page of A4 on a reasonable font (this post is about 760 words in total). And if I was editing, or reviewing, or just pondering, well, that was all progress too.

I currently have two projects in progress. One is a completed manuscript of about 100K words which needs a refresh. The other is a new project. I’m about 40K words in, and considering whether to add some additional voices. If I was going to do this, I thought, I needed to know more about the characters. I set about writing backstory for each of them.

This was the most fun I had during #OctNo. I loved finding out about these people. One was very sweary, one a complete scally, and one was just – well – dull. Luckily she dies early on.

The big manuscript was more of a chore. It needs work, but I’d had differing opinions on what that work should be. I took the advice of someone I trusted and invested in a couple of text books. Some of my #OctNo activities involved reading the books and taking notes, and then reviewing the manuscript. I broke it down into scenes and put a post-it for each on a large bit of card which turned into The Big Pink Plan. Then, when I could see it all, I started adding other post-its to show where things need to change (if you’ve ever read Asimov’s Foundation, it felt like a bad Prime Radiant moment). Once I had that, I was able to think of a way to tweak the story to solve one of the problems I’d uncovered. I’ve re-written the outline, I’ll ponder it a bit more, and then get onto re-writing.

Other activities in the month included reading (well, listening to audiobooks as I commute), drafting a short story, and going to see the inspirational Margaret Atwood talk.

So if you don’t have the capacity to keep up with the needs of #NaNo, I can recommend an #OctNo approach – do plenty of what you love about writing, and don’t beat yourself up. Sharing also helps, because the lovely people of Twitter are always there to support us.

Keep writing!

 

Final #OctNo Tally

Here is the day-by-day summary of what I managed to achieve:

1          520 words

2          507 words plus review of edits

3          515

4          828

5          733

6          Editing

7          538

8          127 plus short story notes

9          659

10        304

11        529

12        Editing

13        Editing

14        Editing

15        Editing

16        527 plus editing

17        Re-planning

18        Re-planning

19        Reviewing the plan and discussing with fellow writer

20        Despairing about the plan

21        Pondering

22        Reading textbook on re-structuring

23        Reading textbook on re-structuring

24        Reading textbook on re-structuring

25        Just reading

26        reviewing the plan

27        reviewing the plan

28        670 (revised outline)

29        575 (revised outline)

30        Talk by Margaret Atwood

31        Summarising #OctNo activity

 

In total:

5,787 words of new project

1,245 words of revised outline for current project

About a billion post-its on the Big Pink Plan

3 audio books

1 text book

1 short story idea

1 inspirational talk