Category: NaNoWriMo

A notebook, pencil and pencil sharpener
NaNoWriMo

NaNoWriMo Week Two

Christina Hollis

End of Week Two, NaNoWriMo!

Last week I wrote about National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo). Writers from all over the world are challenging themselves to write a novel in a month. I’ve managed to write something every day toward my next novel, which is good. My story is so new it doesn’t have a name yet. I’ll be including an extract in my next newsletter. Subscribers who suggest a title will be in with the chance to win a prize. You can sign up for my newsletter here.

I’ve managed to log a total of 21,126 words so far, but it is the roughest of rough drafts. It will take some time to tidy it up, but I’ll worry about that on 1st December!

First Things First

I had the basic storyline planned out in my mind before I began writing. My priority is getting dialogue down on the page. The descriptive flourishes can come later, when I’m not chasing a deadline. Then I can take plenty of time to think, imagine, and get the settings just right.

The only problem with all this writing is that I’m tempted to spend too much time sitting down! Luckily our cheeky canine Alex needs at least a couple of walks a day. That’s a good excuse to get outside and enjoy all the autumn colours.

red holly berries and yellow variegated holly leaves

Birds are beginning to come back to our bird tables. There aren’t so many daylight hours when they can find food in the wild. Winter migrants like redwings and fieldfares have blown in on the north east wind from Scandinavia. That’s good news for birdwatchers, but bad news for anyone hoping to pick holly and mistletoe for Christmas. I’ll need to cover I cover some branches with netting before the birds arrive, or all the berries will be eaten!

Don’t forget, to read an extract from my NaNoWriMo project and enter my competition, sign up for my newsletter here.

Buy my latest book, Royal Passion, here. You can find out more about me here, and see some of my books here.

female software engineer coding on computer
Blog, NaNoWriMo

NaNoWriMo 2023

Christina Hollis

NaNoWriMo 23 is here!

November is National Novel Writing Month. NaNoWriMo 2023 is an international creative writing event in which participants try to complete 50,000 words of a brand new novel during the month of November. I’m taking part this year. Starting with a rough outline of an idea on November 1st, I’m hoping to have at least 50,000 words of a new novel completed by midnight on 30th November.

A Dash of History

The NaNoWriMo challenge was thrown down by freelance writer Chris Baty in San Francisco during July 1999 with 21 participants who hoped to write a book in a month.

NaNoWriMo Winner's certificate, Christina Hollis 2024
My Winner’s Certificate from the last time I took part in NaNoWriMo

NaNoWriMo grew fast, and in 2005 was registered as a non-profit organisation. In 2019 almost half a million people took part. The NaNoWriMo website supplies all kind of support, from motivational articles by well-known authors, hints and tips, and progress badges. There are also local groups all over the world.

A Rush of Inspiration

I began my project (which is so new it doesn’t have a name yet) first thing on 1st November. I’m writing this blog on 3rd November, and I’ve written 5,702 words so far. I spend all my spare time in the afternoon and evening thinking about my story. Then I sleep on my ideas. Next morning, I’m ready to start work with at least one scene pretty much fully-formed in my mind.

Neo‘s Smart

My Alphasmart Neo is key to my success. It’s basically a keyboard with a memory. It has a tiny screen which inhibits looping back to edit as you work, and most importantly of all as far as I’m concerned, it has no access to the internet. There’s no room for procrastination or web surfing. I take my Neo somewhere quiet,  hammer out a stream of consciousness first draft, and then upload it to an open word document on my Mac at the end of the day’s writing session. By November 30th I should have at least 50,000 words of my novel. It may be garbled, but as the old saying goes, the roughest first draft is much easier to work on than a blank page.  

My Alphasmart Neo, ready for NaNoWriMo 23
My Alphasmart Neo

Follow My Progress

For a weekly report on how I’m getting on, sign up for my blog (see the box on the right of this page). I’ll be including an extract of what I’ve produced in my November newsletter, which goes out in three weeks’ time.

To be in at the birth of my next book, sign up for my newsletter here. Subscribers can enter a competition to suggest the title of my NaNoWriMo project. Once you’ve read the excerpt that will be appearing in my November newsletter, send me your idea for a title. You’ll be in with a chance of winning a gift token as a reward for your creativity!

Buy my latest book, Royal Passion, here. You can find out more about me here, and see some of my books here.

dialogue, Dirty Draft, NaNoWriMo, Pomodoro Technique, Writing your Book

Writing Your Book, Part Five—Getting Down And Dirty…

Christina Hollis
One of my three top tips in Part One of Writing Your Book is to create a “dirty” draft. This involves dashing off the first version of your book as fast as you can. 

If your writing time is limited, concentrate your creative energy on getting words down, rather than building images in your readers’ minds. The fun of doing that comes later, when you refine and polish your completed story.

Adapt the Pomodoro technique to help you squeeze every second out of your writing time. That is, set a kitchen timer for thirty minutes, write as fast as you can until the alarm goes off, then take a ten-minute break.

Don’t worry about adding details of your characters’ appearance, or your story’s setting at this stage. You’ll be going back over your work to add this later, along with research details, and spelling, grammar and punctuation checks. 

Getting your thoughts down in words in a high speed stream has some great advantages. You see real progress, fast. There’s nothing like a rapidly growing word count to feed your enthusiasm. Making a note of your daily word count is a real incentive to beat that figure the next time you sit down to write. If you’re taking part in NaNoWriMo, feeding that figure into the community makes you part of the successful process.
http://mybook.to/HeartOfAHostage
“Let me have this one night with you, to remember…”
or http://bit.ly/2euCc60 (US)

The feeling of satisfaction is amazing. When you forge ahead, trying to do as much as you can in the shortest possible time, you carve straight through those nasty briar patches marked doubt and delay threatening to block the path of every writer. Think of an icebreaker ploughing through the Southern Ocean. Keep your head down, and keep going.

You’re never lost for words. It’s impossible to edit a blank page, but once you get something down in black and white, you can go back and develop your work by adding colour, detail and shades of meaning. Conflict drives the best stories, and its most reliable power source is dialogue between great characters. Put their emotions and arguments down into conversation. You can worry about the scenery later. 

The line of dialogue; …let me have this one night with you, to remember… popped into my head as I woke up one morning. I built the story of Heart Of A Hostage around it by imagining how that conversation started, and how it would end. By writing that out as fast as I could, I made a commitment to write the book which has become one of my favourites. 
Day One, Motivation, NaNoWriMo, Pay It Forward, productivity, Targets, Writing your Book

Writing Your Book, Part Four—On Your Marks, Get Set…

Christina Hollis

…and this is what you get after completing your marathon!

…Go!

November 1st each year fires the starting gun on National Novel Writing Month. Join up, and you commit to writing 50,000 words over the month of November (that works out at a shade under 1,700 words a day)

If you’ve read Part One of this series, (you can find it here), you’ll know that making a firm commitment and telling other people what you’re going to do makes it easier to succeed. Putting the news out there gives you an immoveable target, and spreading the word makes it harder for you to back out!

There are all sorts of participation and milestone badges to achieve through NaNoWriMo as you work toward the goal of writing your book.  Fill in your profile on the NaNoWriMo site to link up with thousands of other authors. You’ll find encouragement, and you can then pay it forward by helping others through their own sticky writing patches.

Any completed word count is a success story. If you achieve the ultimate and manage to reach the heroic target of 50k words, you’re judged a winner. You get a fancy certificate, like the one above. More importantly, you’ll have the satisfaction of proving to yourself you can stick with your project for a concentrated period of thirty days.

I find NaNoWriMo really useful spur to productivity. It gives me the motivation to start a project, and other members give me the support to continue. Why not try it this year? You can find out more at NaNoWriMo.org—sign in, and you’ll be ready for Day One tomorrow!

Brackenridge, Love Lies Bleeding, NaNoWriMo, Wolf's Bane

NaNoWriMo 2015: The Writing Begins!

Christina Hollis
A wintry mystery…Pic by Alexas Fotos

I’m posting my blog a day early today, as the first of November marks the start of NaNoWrMo—(National Novel Writing Month). The Na should properly be Int, as it’s an international  phenomenon now!

I’m going to be pretty busy for the next month, trying to hit an average word count of 2,100 per day. My project for this year’s NaNoWriMo is the first draft of Wolf’s Bane, the second book in my Brackenridge trilogy of romantic novels.  I want to reach a total of 63,000 words by the end of November. It’s a mountain to climb, but that’s the beauty of NaNoWriMo. By breaking the task of producing a complete manuscript down into individual bite-sized chunks, it doesn’t feel so hard. That’s the theory, anyway… 


Finishing the first draft is one thing. There’ll be plenty of polishing to be done, but that can wait. NaNoWriMo simply gets the framework in place. I’ve already filled out character sheets for my protagonists, Sophia and Josh, so I know how they’ll react to whatever is thrown at them while I’m writing at speed. You can find out more about how I develop my characters here.


Josh and Sophia met in Love Lies Bleeding, a contemporary crime novel which is currently in post-production. In Wolf’s Bane, the perfect new life Sophia has built for herself is leaving her faintly dissatisfied. She’s spent years dreaming about becoming a lawyer, then she does a good turn which makes her question her motives—and makes Josh realise that danger haunts them both, every moment of every day. Dark secrets and ancient legends are a deadly combination…

Have you tried using NaNoWriMo to help you make a start on writing your book? There’s a copy of my Romance Review’s Readers’ Choice Nominee, His Majesty’s Secret Passion, on offer for a comment drawn at random on 7th November.