November's going to be busy

I think I may have to sleep through most of December. I'll need to after the November that looks likely...

Firstly and most excitingly, I have another play on. It's a 10-minute cheerful short called "Lost Things" and it's part of Play Pieces Shorts festival of new writing. It's the last show of the evening on the first of the two days (14 - 15 Nov) and the organiser was kind enough to say she scheduled it there to send the audience off happy at the end of the evening. And yes, it is a optimistic play with no murderers or anything horror within. Rather unusual - though I do enjoy writing a bit of comedy. With the help of some brilliant Inverness College drama students we've cast the roles this week, and rehearsals start next week. I'm directing, which I'm looking forward to, and it's going to be performed in a large open plan vintage shop in Inverness - The Village. It sounds like it's going to be a really interesting couple of evenings with a varied bill.

And as if that wasn't enough to keep me busy, I'm also going to do NaNoWriMo again - writing 50K words of a novel in the 30 days of November. That's just under 2000 words per day. I managed last year with a week off to have eye surgery, so I hope it'll be achievable again this year. I have a basic plan: I'm going for a claustrophobic horror, with an unsettling feel. Back to horror, yeah! I have a support group this year: several of the Eden Court Novel Writing group are also NaNo-ing, and it'll be good to have the company for write-ins and some gentle nagging about word count.

And work is going to be getting manic as data pours in from all 6 countries for me to analyse, and I am of course popping down to London for a bit. I may have to start drinking this coffee thing that people rave about...