I participated in NaNoWriMo this year, in spite of my objections to the use of the word “National” in the title of what is by now surely a global event. GloNoWriMo works just as well.

Anyway, I squeezed out 50000 words, somehow, in this hard term for teaching with a workload to die for from.

Don’t know if I’ll finish it, or even if I could if I wanted to. I don’t know if I could come up with an ending. I’ve done it in the past: you just write and write and while you’re writing, inspiration can strike, and you suddenly get that hook, the thing that’s going to drive you towards some sort of ending. But it’s probably a symptom of general tiredness that I wasn’t really feeling it this year.

And yet: I dribbled out 50,000 words, by putting together a couple of ideas I’d had in the past and trying to make them work together.

You’ll be wanting to know what it was about. It’s about a widower who is presented with an opportunity to find out why his journalist wife was murdered fifteen years before. By resurrecting some old technology, he and a retired cop come across documents left by his wife which lead them in a direction previously unexplored.

That’s the bones. Which is all I really banged out in November, without knowing how it would end. I left it in the middle of things, on the South Bank of the Thames, with the red lights winking on the construction cranes. Just abandoned it, with relief, as I crossed the 50,000 word target.

In writing the material left by the wife, Jo, on old floppy disks, I was confronted with the problem of digging back to the turn of the century. What was it like back then? I mean, if you were travelling abroad in the summer of 2000, what network access would you have had, what phone would you have been using? How much was the internet a part of your life? I’m sure I’ve dropped things into sentences that make no sense in the world of 2000 or 2002.

I didn’t have a mobile phone till about six or seven years after that, although I did have a Palm Organiser with a colour screen and a stylus that I synched to my Mac. Had absolutely no use for it, of course (got it from Macworld for a Letter of the Month). Those days! As for the internet, I think we got that at home while I was doing my PhD, late 90s, but if I’d been abroad in 2000 (as I almost certainly was at some point), I’d not even have missed it back then.

But it’s by creating these problems and limitations for myself that I hope to unlock something interesting. I just have no idea what.