Calling All Cat Lovers

My story 'Monty The Tabby Tom Cat' - inspired by a real life, Monty, belonging to my son and daughter-in-law, Jon and Rebecca, - appears in 'The Cat Who Chose Us and other Cat Stories' and is available at Amazon. 
http://www.amazon.co.uk/The-Cat-Chose-other-Stories/dp/1326012940
All proceeds to Cats Protection.

Out With The Old...

I ended 2014 by succumbing to the horrible sore throat and coughing bug that seems to be doing the rounds. I did feel well enough to make the first meeting of the New Year with my writing group yesterday and knew it was time to get back to my writing. So, here goes...

 In my very first blog post on January 1st 2014, I wrote

I need to set myself some goals. I think, I procrastinate, I dilly-dally and dither so.........in 2014 I must WRITE,WRITE, WRITE! 
Here are the goals I've set myself:

• Start a writing blog  
• Write regularly and more often
• Get at least one story published in a woman's magazine
• Get back on track with my novel and finish a first draft.

I look forward to sharing my progress with you. Any advice gratefully received!

How did I do? Which of those goals were achieved?

• The Writing Blog - achieved    Apart from holidays and over Christmas, I have managed to post quite often. I am very grateful to the writers who have commented regularly - you know who you are so a big thank you! - and although sometimes there may not be many actual comments, the 'stats' reveal that the blog is being read.

         Stats - 51 posts with 317 comments, 9663 page views which included 4612 from the USA, 3828 from UK followed by page views in China, Germany, Ukraine, Russia, Romania and Poland. The post with the most views was the Woman's Weekly Workshop one.

         I'm sure the fact that after each new post, I put a link to my blog on my Jan Baynham Writer Facebook page as well as tweet on @JanBayLit has widened the readership.

• Write regularly and more often - achieved in part   I still don't write as much as I could. I spend too much time thinking about it. It's as if I need deadlines all the time - competition deadlines and the keeping up the word count of Nano worked for me. All I need to do is set deadlines for myself, I suppose.

• Get at least one story published in a woman's magazine - not achieved    Over 2014, I sent two to Take a Break Fiction Feast, two to The People's Friend and one to Woman's Weekly. That's not enough, is it? 
• It wasn't all doom and gloom on the short story front, though. Four more stories have been published on Alfie Dog Fiction, one of which was selected for the ghost anthology The Day Death Wore Boots.
• Four of my stories have been published on Cafe Lit and three more on Creative Frontiers, one of which was serialised over five days. 
• My story 'Missing Without Trace' was long listed in the Alfie Dog Short Story competition and my entry, 'Second Chances', was long listed in the Worcester LitFest Flash Fiction competition. It was included in the anthology Fifty Flashes of Fiction. 

• Get back on track with my novel and finish a first draft - almost achieved Although I haven't finished the first draft entirely, I have completed a great deal of it, 52000+ words. I'm definitely back on track with it and know where I'm going. Taking part in Nano in November was the way I achieved so much progress towards this goal. It proved I can sustain my ideas in an extended piece of writing and I'm excited about completing the first draft in the early part of the  year.

• I didn't achieve all of my 2014 goals but as this blog is about my writing journey, I certainly feel I have made progress and am looking forward to the year of writing ahead.

...In With The New

Here are my goals for the New Year:

• Complete the first draft of the novel and work on it so that I feel ready to apply to the RNA New Writers' scheme at 12.02 a.m. next January 1st. I had hoped to do that this year but knew it wouldn't be ready by the deadline in 2015. The piece of advice that I kept hearing in my mind was 'Make it the best you can.' Yes, I know I could have sent it in even though it wasn't finished but I know I have to finish a complete first draft before I can set about getting it 'to the best I can.' 
• Continue to write short stories and submit them to competitions and magazines. Perhaps set myself a goal of two new stories a month with the end of the month date as the deadline. 
• Aim to get one story accepted in a print magazine before the end of December 2015.
• Aim to make the short list of a short story competition sometime during the coming year.

I hope they are SMART targets for me.

Do you think they are specific enough? 

How I be able to measure my success? 

Are they achievable for the stage I'm at on my writing journey? 

Realistic for me?

Is a year too vague? Would it be better to break the year down into smaller chunks of time? 

What do you think? What are your goals and targets for 2015? I'd love it if you'd leave a comment. Thanks. :-)

Thank you for reading my blog and all good wishes for a very productive year in 2015! HAPPY WRITING! 

Making Lists

I'm definitely a list person. Writing a blog post has been on one of my lists for a while! Over the last week or so, I've made:

• a Christmas card list - all ticked and posted
• a present list - all bought and many have been packed
• a general to-do list 

It's always good to see the list of things to-do get shorter and items get ticked off but this time of year as soon as one thing is done, another gets added! I'm looking forward to all the family arriving tomorrow and can't wait to share our grandsons' excitement in the build up to Christmas Day itself.

Recently, I've made a couple of other types of lists too. 

On November 30th, I travelled to Worcester for the launch of the Fifty Flashes of Fiction. This is the new anthology of entries in the Worcestershire LitFest & Fringe’s Flash Fiction competition in which I made the long-list. Congratulations to the winner, Linda Daunter.  I recognised Linda's name from her blog and Alfie Dog Fiction so it was lovely to meet her in person. It was the first literary event I'd been to and I was surprised how nervous I was when I read out my story.

On the same day, the winner of the Alfie Dog Fiction Short Story Competition was announced. Congratulations to the winner, Lori Windsor Mohr, and to Vanessa Horn and Veronica Bright who came joint 2nd. Their stories may be downloaded from Alfie Dog from today. I was very pleased that my story 'Missing Without Trace' made the long-list in that competition too. 

You-know-who makes lists as well! I'm just hoping my name's on the right list......

Wishing you all a very happy Christmas! Thank you for your support throughout the year and see you in 2015.

You may follow me on Twitter @JanBayLit and on Jan Baynham Writer Facebook page.

Was NaNo a No-no?
This afternoon, I wrote my fifty thousand, two hundred and eighty fourth word for NaNo. Yeah! 

This was my very first experience of NaNoWriMo and because I have a busy weekend coming up, I've reached the target three days early. When I think back to the start on November 1st, I could not have envisaged doing that so no, NaNo was not a no-no for me! 

I realise that all the really hard work starts now but taking part in the project has proved to me that I can:

• produce an extended piece of writing. Up until now, both my college dissertations were only 10,000 words each and my children's novel was around 13,000 words.
• sustain an idea and work through a plot and sub-plots
• get to know characters by immersing myself in their company. As I wrote, I found out things about them that I could never have imagined when I met them first.
• keep to the target word count and even exceed it. On the few occasions when I couldn't write, I made sure I made up for it by writing more the next time I came back to writing.

Here is what my stats chart looks like today:

Your Average Per Day

1,733 

Words Written Today

151 

Target Word Count

50,000

Target Average Words Per Day

1,667

Total Words Written

50,284 WINNER!

Words Remaining

0

Current Day

29 

Days Remaining

2

Goal Achieved On

November 28, 2014

What were the drawbacks?

• a lot of my time has been taken up writing. I'm retired so have the luxury of doing what I want each day. I can imagine that writers with full time jobs or young children to look after would have to find the time from their already busy lives. 
• I didn't edit. I just wrote....and wrote. I can see that I have most likely made the editing and redrafting of the novel much harder. 
• I don't know if the writing is good enough. By concentrating on getting the words down and keeping to the word count target, I didn't reflect on what I had written.
• I hadn't done enough research so there are gaps in the story where accurate details will need to be added to give the novel authenticity.
• I've neglected my on-line critique group. I've managed to attend all the writing group meetings locally and sent the odd message of congratulations or encouragement but I haven't taken the time to actually download a story and critique it. Sorry!

Thanks to these people for their support:

• My Nano writing buddies who have sent encouraging messages, especially Susanna Bavin, Sue McDonagh, Samantha Bacchus, Kath Eastman.
• Members of my on-line critique group, Write-critical. 

What next?

• Make and decorate a Man City football cake for Isaac, my grandson, who's going to be seven next Friday.
• And maybe....start my Christmas shopping! 

All our circumstances will have been different and so will our goals. I hope that NaNoWriMo 2014 was a good experience for you. Please leave a comment and share your experience if you took part this year.

Thank you for reading my blog.

You may also follow me @JanBayLit on Twitter and on my Jan Baynham Writer Face Book page.

NaNoWriMo Progress

Your Average Per Day

1,530 

Words Written Today

0 

Target Word Count

50,000

Target Average Words Per Day

1,667

Total Words Written

32,145 

Words Remaining

17,855

Current Day

21 

Days Remaining

10

At This Rate You Will Finish On

December 3, 2014

These are my stats so far and as you can see I have some catching up to do. I'm hoping that today's writing will improve the situation so this is will be a short blog post. Good luck to fellow NaNo writers as we go into the last lap! 

Thanks to CAFE LIT for publishing my WW2 story this week. The editor, Debz-Hobbs Wyatt said it was '..dedicated to all those who lost their lives fighting to give us the lives we have.' It was inspired by this photograph of my lovely Mum. I hope you will enjoy reading it.

Photographs are often used by writers to inspire their stories. What picture has inspired you?

Thank you for reading my blog.

You may follow me @JanBayLit on Twitter and on my Jan Baynham Writer Facebook page.

** STOP PRESS**

Have you ever wanted something so badly that you were tempted to do something drastic to get it? My story, 'I want' Gets Nothing, starts as a serial on Creative Frontiers today. Please click here for PART 1 if you'd like to read it. 

Why not pop in each day to see what happens?

PART 2
PART 3
PART 4
CONCLUSION

Thanks to everyone who has followed the story all week. :-)

Just a Quick Update
Six days into NaNoWriMo, how is everyone doing? 

This is my first attempt at taking part so I didn't really know how it would be. However, I've managed to write every day but each day has been different as you would expect. I got off to a flying start at the weekend as there was a lot of football on the television (!!) but Monday wasn't so good. I had my usual writing group meeting in the afternoon and my first attendance at a new monthly critique group Write Fiction in the evening. I wasn't at the first meeting due to holidays so I didn't want to miss it. There, I met another NaNoWriMo newbie, Sue McDonagh, and she is now one of my NaNo writing buddies so that was good. It just meant that I had to make up by writing more words on the following days.

Here are some facts about my week:

• Total number of words written so far:                       10,994
• Average number of words written per day:                1,832
• Number of days left:                                                        25
• If I keep up the same average daily average, I should complete my 50,000 words on November 28th - 2 days early!

So, have I kept to my pledges that I posted last week? Let me remind you what they were:

1. FB comments, Tweets and blog posts must be kept to an absolute minimum (...if at all!)
2. I must just write and not edit.
3. If I get stuck on one particular part of the story, I must move on and write another part.
4. I must try to write every day.

YES to 2. and 4. 

• Not editing has been hard. I'm itching to get back in there and improve the writing but apart from correcting the odd word her and there, I haven't edited.
• Writing every day has been good as I have immersed myself in the story and am getting to know my characters better.

N/A to 3. as yet

• At the moment, the story is flowing quite well but I know this will change as I get further into the novel. I'm concentrating on the 1965 story to start with. Having a rough plan was definitely as good idea.

And then there's 1. - PARTLY

• I don't think I have been on Facebook, Twitter or reading Blogs as much as usual but I have been on, especially when I have finished writing for the day and updated my NaNo word count.

Thank you to everyone who has sent me encouraging comments to keep going. Writers are just the most supportive group, aren't they?

Thank you for reading my blog. Please leave a comment especially if you are or have been a NaNoWriMo participant. How have you got on this week? What have been the stumbling blocks for you? What has helped you stay on track?