Following on from my arguably self-indulgent post about not reaching my National Novel Writing Month goal, I received (as I suspect many other participants did) a very friendly e-mail from Chris Baty, founder of NaNoWriMo, sending the e-mail equivalent of a cup of tea and a reassuring pat on the shoulder, in which he said “Successfully pulling off anything creative given our ridiculously high standards and congenitally overscheduled lives is a miracle, and sometimes that battle just can’t be won in a single month”, which I’ll cheerfully admit, made me feel better about it. Thanks, Chris.

Anyway, moving away from me and onto you, my loyal audience, I thought I’d share with you the fact that a number of genuine actual real published authors wrote Pep Talks for people participating in NaNoWriMo, and that these are now available to read on the NaNoWriMo website specifically, here.

Granted, they use a lot of words specific to people writing a novel in a month, but I think that there are many words of wisdom (from, let’s not forget, proper writers) to be found in the Pep Talks – not least in Neil Gaiman’s message, where he rightly says “nobody else is going to write your novel for you”.

Hmm, maybe I should have that printed off and stick up versions of it around the flat, replacing ‘novel’ with ‘screenplay’, ‘radio play’, and any other unfinished items which are currently lurking on my hard drive…