…well, I am anyway. Hello, how are you? All right ? Yes? Good.

I’m back after a prolonged (though not unforeseen) absence. As well as taking some time off from blogging to concentrate on my novel-related stuff, I also took myself out of dear old Blighty to the Dominican Republic for a couple of weeks (for those of you whose sense of geography is akin to mine, it’s in the Caribbean). Very nice, though Tropical Storm Noel was rather on our heels as we were leaving. Still, home safely, and it was a beautiful place, even if I had to go a fortnight without a proper cup of tea (airline tea most definitely does not count).

As for the writing: well, I made some progress with ‘Coming Back To Haunt You’, and now have the chapter breakdowns until the end of the book, but didn’t get it all done. But as per my plan I’ve started on ‘The Body Orchard’ as part of National Novel Writing Month – the aim of which is to write a 50,000 novel in one month (that’s about 1660 words a day). I don’t know if ‘TBO’ is likely to go over that wordcount (given my tendency to logorrhoea, I wouldn’t be surprised), but I’m aiming to get 50,000 words done anyway, and if the story needs more pages after that, then so be it. I started pretty well yesterday, possibly because I’m deliberately ‘turning off my inner editor’ to thrash out what I know is a first draft, so any mistakes or whatever can be corrected when I re-draft it. It felt quite liberating in a way to put stuff down knowing it’s not perfect by any stretch of the imagination – hope the novelty lasts (well, at least until the end of the month).

Whilst I’m quite pleased about the icon to the right, I’ll see if I can arrange a link to take you to an ongoing total of my word count. So far it’s about 1700 (I’m doing it longhand, so vagueness is inevitable), which is on target, but we’ll see how it goes.

Are any of you folks doing NaNoWriMo this year? Let me know if you are. And if you’re not, then feel free to post a comment or e-mail me some words of support/abuse (delete as applicable)…