After taking a break in 2011, I decided to do NaNoWriMo again in 2012. This time though, I knew I wasn’t going to play by the rules. On the one hand, I had been slacking in my Every Photo Tells… stories and I really needed to sit down and write more. On the other hand, I had already started to write on my doctoral thesis quite some time ago, done a ton of research, but hadn’t really sat down to do the proper writing. When I started, I had only 25 pages of my dissertation written. Another two weeks off in December added into the mix and I was hoping for a first draft to give my doctoral advisor in the new year. Here is the story of how it went – more detailed in the end – and lots of rambling in between.
With those two things, I thought I could manage 50000 words. My dear husband Mick was also going to take part and bend his set of rules. For him, the big deal was to finish Some Other Scotland. Since he reckoned the book would need at least another 50K in words, it was his goal to (almost) finish it.
To get the whole thing off to a good start, we decided to take a couple of days off work. So from Nov 1 to 6, we were at home and could write all day. Lucky Mick took 2 days each in the following two weeks off as well. But that’s his story. Anyway, it started off a bit slow. I knew I wasn’t going to kill it like I did in 2010 – especially with Non-Fiction being so much slower on the word count due to research and reading up on stuff. At some point I was also expecting to run out of short story ideas – which I also eventually did. For the first two days, I wrote 2000 words each. Well above minimum level but still… for having the whole day off it seemed not enough for me. Day 3 was me writing a short story. A WHOLE 6k short story. That gave me the major boost that I needed to go ahead into the first week of working and NaNoIng.
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On Valentine’s Day 2010, Mick Bordet and I launched our first episode of our short story podcast Every Photo Tells… 
