The pressure is off!

It isn’t finished yet…

but I’ve done the 50,000 words I needed to.  Thanks for bearing with me.

It’s that time again!

For the eighth consecutive year, I shall attempt to write the first draft of a novel this November during NaNoWriMo.

This year’s effort has a working title of Boyle’s Law: the adventure begins. It is a continuation of Andrea: in search of space (currently being serialised) and will take the story forward beyond the initial search for a habitable planet.

Introductory blurb:

The crew of His Majesty’s Deep Space Vessel Colin Pillinger have successfully identified a planet where up to a third of the human population of an overcrowded Earth can potentially relocate. Commander Paige Boyle must leave her post to take up a vital task on-planet.

Supported by Rear Admiral Andrea Smithson and Commodore Ishmael Al-Kawazi on board the vessel, Paige’s job is to create a civilian structure, physical and political, based on the best humanity can achieve, a structure that must ultimately be scalable for a substantial human population.

How will she deal with what her colleagues learn from the current and past occupants of the planet? Will the new knowledge and the new challenges help them to settle – or unsettle them?

What is this new knowledge? What are these new challenges? And who are the Ringans? I’m a ‘pantser’. I provide the blank page, the starting seed and the keyboard, and trust the characters to do the work for me; to evolve the story organically. In other words, I have no idea yet what this knowledge and these challenges will be — but I can’t wait to find out! 

This is the first candidate cover. It’s there to give me a focal point, and it will probably change.

You didn’t know Paige Boyle was of African heritage? Neither did I until I saw her photograph. I’ll bet you didn’t know that she was, briefly, married to Dr Jack Turner, either, did you? Or that she kept her maiden name, Boyle, because she refused to be called Paige Turner! And that’s (probably) just the beginning of the revelations this story has to offer.

Oops, I’m doing it again!

For the seventh consecutive year, I shall write the first draft of a novel this November during NaNoWriMo.

We were supposed to have been spending part of November in Kerala, which would have interfered with my ability to concentrate on writing lies, but the current pandemic has led to that trip being postponed. So – thirty days, fifty thousand words.

This year’s effort, with a working title of Andrea, will be a sequel to Making Merry (US link) but it will take the story forward in a more sober vein. That’s the plan, anyway. We’ll see how it goes.

Introductory blurb: Fresh from her work on Project Prodigialis, Rear Admiral Andrea Smithson takes command of the Terra II project. The massive, in-system, luxury cruise liner has been refitted and recommissioned in the Royal Space Regiment fleet as HMSV Colin Pillinger. Her mission? To identify, locate and survey a habitable but uninhabited planet which can be populated over time to take pressure off Earth and its resources.