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Little Cakes, Big Trouble

I started a crazy project last year that I called Proust's Pepys.

I tweeted the best bits of my diaries and emails from the last 15 years each day. And I had a companion blog with some of the writing that I found that was publishable, but hadn’t been posted on here.

It was loosely inspired by Real Time WWII, but unlike Real Time WWII, which is exponentially more worthy and going strong for three years, I barely made two and a half months.

I didn't let anyone know about the twitter feed or the blog, because I had not created it for an audience so much as to enforce a deadline each day. I had to collate the information, curate it and post it before midnight each day.

Sometimes I made the deadline, sometimes I posted a week in one day. But the set deadline was very, very useful for keeping me on track. Mostly because historically, deadlines and I do NOT see eye to eye.

I love deadlines. I like the whooshing sound they make as they fly by.
Douglas Adams

Stressed as I was for those fateful weeks, I did develop an appreciation for just how much writing I have done in my lifetime - in emails alone I (and my best friends, as replies from them are included) clocked up:

June: 27,679 words
July: 56,867 words
August: 32,525 words

I never got to September, thanks to a little stage play that I then started writing, and that is probably a good thing as the December to February period was going to include a year in which a correspondent and I regularly wrote 2,000 words a day to each other at a minimum.

I am looking forward to going back in the next few years to doing all the other months, but somehow I think I will be doing them in more manageable chunks of a month at a time.

Which brings me to my new, naughty challenge for this year.

I just signed up to National Novel Writing Month: a 50,000 word book in November, and, if my writing group is up for it, a script in July with Camp NaNoWriMo.

I hope that this years projects, with the addition of friends doing the same task and a more public deadline, will propel me to more original work in greater volumes.

The less said about public failure the better. Although I am not too worried, I just read the story of NaNoWriMo and it was so charmingly full of terrible obstacles, I just know everything will work out okay.

Comments

rentawitch said…
Break a leg..... I did a whole day on NaNoMoWro... or whatever it's called. <>
Awesome! One day more than me so far. What style of novel did you start?

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