NANOWRIMO

November has always been one of my least favourite months.  It's an anti-climatical (is that a word?) month.  It's after a birthday and before Christmas.  It's usually the beginning of cold and it has fireworks in it.  I'm not a huge fan of fireworks, although I do accept that other people like them and there will be bangs, whizzes and crashes when it's dark.  Although, it would be much more sociable to set them off during the day, I can't imagine they would be as much fun in the light. It's like February, which is also cold and pointless.  As a child I always got the two months confused. Who am I kidding?  A child?  I still do.

It is also a busy month for any music teacher.  The run up to Christmas: the attempt to teach 11 songs for a school nativity in 4 lessons, getting the reluctant year 6's to sing in Latin for the Church Service, teaching the recorder group to play Jingle Bells and perfecting the choir's repertoire of Christmas songs ready to be performed at any event or old people's home that we are asked to. The long month of November can stretch on and on.

November has always been a month of events that I wish I could join in with.  Fireworks:  I know I don't like them but other people seem to have a lot of fun with them.  Movember:  I've tried growing a moustache but it just doesn't seem to happen.

NaNoWriMo is something that I've always wanted to have a go at.  I think it stands for National Novel Writing Month and the idea is that you spend November writing a bit of your novel every day.  I assume National refers to America because of the stupid acronym, which makes it sound sort-of Mexican but there is no reason why we can't all join in.  Usually, I make the excuse of being too busy or that it is too cold to write.  There's always an excuse not to write.  But this year I have just started an online creative writing course and so there's no excuse not to try it really.

This is the 5th day of actually getting up when I wake up, pulling on my brown cardigan (every writer needs a brown cardigan), creeping downstairs and turning the laptop on.  I am proud to say that after 10 hours of writing I have a first chapter that is complete rubbish and no one would ever want to read. I also have freezing fingers and will probably be quite tired after a day with children.