For the second half of this year I’ve found myself desperately trying to catch up on my film review blogs so I can make time for a couple of other writing projects. The thing is, the film blogging thing was only ever intended to be one string to my bow, the result of years of wanting to review every single film I’ve ever watched and store them all on a website which would be available to the whole world – if the world deemed me worthy, of course. In fairness 2014 has been an incredibly busy year and I’ve not written anywhere nearly as much as I would have liked, however for reasons that I won’t go into I’ve now got a bit more spare time on my hands and I find that I now have the opportunity to churn out hundreds or maybe even a couple of thousand words a day on top of the day job and my other hobbies and interests.
Last year I tried starting a novel for National Novel Writing Month, an annual competition of sorts that takes place every November. Your task is to try writing 50,000 words inside a month. Suffice to say, with time being as limited as it has been, last year I managed 3000 words. This year I started a new novel plan (because I didn’t have enough time to go back to the 2013 idea) and managed 4000 words before life once again got in the way. I didn’t manage 50,000 words before the end of November, not even close, but I do at least have a very genuine intention of finishing this novel and hopefully many more thereafter.
I find a lot of my ideas come from dreams. The first two novels I’m working on originally started as recurring dreams, and recently I’ve taken the basic premise of another three or four novels from several other dreams that my subconscious has dumped on me. I shouldn’t complain, even despite those dreams often manifesting in the room when I wake up – it’s safe to say that I have a very overactive imagination which has its good and bad points.
I’ve spent much of my adult life wanting to develop my creative talents, and whilst I have always enjoyed active filming days on sketches, films and so on, most of those efforts have been limited by resources and never live up to the images that are in my head. I decided quite recently that the best way for me to scratch that particular creative itch is to try making progress into the novel writing business – something which I’ve been giving serious thought to for many years. I’ll be continuing with the film blogs, don’t worry about that (and if you weren’t worrying, then carry on as you were). Now though, I find myself in the position where I have all of these ideas buzzing around and I need an outlet for them. Why not turn them into novels? So over the coming months – and provided I can keep the motivation up – this website will slowly evolve to include all of my writing in whatever form that takes. Much of it will be film blogs simply because I continue to watch a lot of films and it would be a waste to not carry it on for at least a few years until I have reviewed everything I’ve seen or wanted to see. Until then, I will be doing what I’ve been doing over this last week, finding a balance between watching films, writing about films, and planning novels. I’m genuinely looking forward to the possibilities that 2015 has to offer.
