Author Journey (July 14, 2025)

I am in full-blown holiday mode right now after spending a week in England and another in Sicily. On top of that I found something really cool in Legoland!

Author Journey (July 14, 2025)

What happened?

Over the last two weeks, I’ve spent most of my time relaxing, however, that surprisingly didn’t give me much time to keep up with my usual goals. I didn’t watch any anime, I haven’t read any manga, and, other than this one, I haven’t written any posts. That impacts my ability to relax a little, but I think I’ve needed some time to do nothing.

On the flight to England, I managed to watch a movie – Mickey 17, which was a lot of fun. I definitely need to find a way to fit more movies into my life… Anyhow, since I have nothing else to report, I’ll fill the rest of the post with an account of the first time I completed NaNoWriMo. Also, before that, here’s what I found in Legoland!

How it all began!

I’m not sure exactly when I wanted to become a writer… I do remember writing stories at school and getting good marks for them, however, it never occurred to me that it could be a career path. Some years later, I discovered that I really wanted to write a novel. I think it was while I was lifeguarding and busy doing anything to keep my mind occupied. Lifeguarding is nothing like Baywatch!

Anyhow, it wasn’t until 2007 when I took part in my first NaNoWriMo and failed spectacularly. I basically ran out of steam after ten days. Then, almost exactly a year later one of my colleagues at work suggested that we all did NaNoWriMo as a group activity. On November 1st 2008, we began the craziest and most enjoyable project I’ve even experienced.

Rather than each writing a novel, we did it as a group. We decided on an order and got to work. The idea was that one person wrote the first day and then sent the document to the next person to add their part and so on and so on. We all got to read the new addition each morning which really kept us going.

Then, disaster struck. One member of the group was disappointed with the direction the story was going so he wrote his final part in the middle of the month and killed almost everyone. Now, we could have removed his part and carried on but that seemed like cheating, so we came up with a brilliantly absurd idea.

We introduced Chuck Norris to the story and had him reverse time for some bizarre reason. Then, we carried on without another mention of Chuck. It was hilarious. So, we continued from there as a group of four. There were days where people couldn’t complete their part so we skipped them or did double days. Amazingly, we reached the end of November with a complete 54,900 word story.

What happened next!

I still have a copy of that story and a lot of fond memories to go with it. After that, I took some writing classes, wrote a load of short stories and pieces of flash fiction. I started a blog two years later to work on my writing where I watched and reviewed 365 films in a year. That was also a lot of fun.

After that, I took on NaNoWriMo on my own and reached the goal in just twenty-one days. One day, I plan on rewriting that one and then releasing it into the world. Anyhow, this has been a deviation from my normal Author Journey posts but it has been fun revisiting old memories. Come back in two weeks for another fascinating dive into my author journey. Thanks for reading.

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