It is my birthday today, I am 50 years old. While that is not much of an achievement for those much older, given I was dead for 8 minutes 28 months ago, I think it is worth celebrating. I was placed in an induced coma and given a 20% chance of surviving. Well, here I am and I plan to stay around for quite a while longer. So what about those who never made it to 50? George Orwell died at 47, just as the fame that had eluded him all his life finally caught up. Jane Austen never made it to fifty, either. Anne and Emily Bronte and Sylvia Plath passed away young, as did Anne Frank. Shelly, Byron, Keats and Kerouac as well as Stephen Crane. Hemingway did himself in with a shotgun at 63 but W.Somerset Maugham was in his 90s. Speaking of fossils, there are still a couple of great writers aging away as I speak including Jose Saramago, Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Mario Vargas Llosa.

So what is age and what does it give the writer other than a lot of material and a certain smugness to know you made it this far? When I was a young bloke I knew I wanted to write fiction but I decided I would wait until I was 40, then I felt I had something to write about. I was 35 at the time so I got started the next day, no point waiting. I haven’t written much inthe way of fiction of late, too busy with the stuff that (hopefully) pays money but this month I signed up for NaNoWriMo. I have thoroughly enjoyed crafting ‘Twenty Seven Seventy’ and I plan on writing more about this post code in the future. This is where I live and the people int he story, as will be those in the short story collection to follow, are the people I share this community with.

Where I live is a low socio economic area in western Sydney and it has a reputation as being rough. Well there are plenty of rough people here but there are many who are good and decent and appreciate art and literature, too. We just got a terrific new library here in Mt Druitt and it is the equal of any in the upscale, money suburbs. It gets used a lot too and that has to tell you something. So why shouldn’t I write about where I live, the stories here are as rich as those anywhere in the world. It’s how you tell them!

It is the second day of NaNoWriMo and so far I have written 8318 words and am well ahead of the average required. At this rate, according to the Stats page of my NaNoWriMo.org account I will have it written by the 12th. I won’t because on that day there is a 50th birthday party I must attend, right after I tech one of my courses at the local community college. As it is my birthday party I will be attending and at the end of it probably in no fit state to write coherent passages.

So how did I manage so many words in so little time. Part of the reason is that I planned the novel before I started writing. The other secret is that the 1st of November started in Australia many hours before it began in the USA where the contest is managed from. A bit of a head start you might say. The big secret though was the pre planning. I had the idea all sorted including characters, plot, structure, setting, conflict and theme, all written down before the start. That meant I had time to write a few sample paragraphs and get my voice sorted out and clear up a few issues. Not that I have ever been one for writer’s block, just doesn’t happen to me. If I can’t think of something to write about topic X, I write about topic Y instead. By the time I finish or get bored with Y, something has come to me for X.

I also don;t have any paying clients at the moment other than my own Internet Safety Essentials web project where I am providing the content and writing the units of learning for the online writing course. Those I do one week at a time so that the students don’t get swamped ahead of time (my excuse) and as work is down and it is the worst time of the year (more bills than income opportunities) I need to spend time marketing my business.

So the NaNoWriMo is actually recreational writing for me, even though I fully intend to publish and sell the finished product. I like the way you have a word target to reach within a set time period and you know there are many others out there also writing away. I have several other writing projects in various stages of undress I need to address. One is an autobiography, the others are novels/novellas. I used to write a lot more short stories until I started writing for a living. Now, like a mechanic with a clapped out car, my writing tends to be factual for clients more than fictional for my pleasure. Now, all I need is that six figure advance and I can turn my hand to novel writing full time!