This is my NaNoWriMo entry this year. OK so I didn't 'win'. I came in slightly under 40 thousand words. Also, that's not the whole story, but I did reach a point I can realistically call the end of part 1. (There's now an intended part 2, hence categorising this at novel > 40,000 words.)

Honestly, I can go months without seeing anyone, it seems, and when try to do this suddenly my house is full of people! I'm actually surprised I did as well as I did, and it's the best by far of my three (so far) attempts at NaNoWriMo.

So what I'm going to do now is start releasing what I've done at a rate of one scene a day. This isn't quite the same as releasing a day's work at a time: There were days when I wrote nothing, and days when I wrote two, three or even four scenes, and scenes that took two or three days to write. Although the release is removed from the writing schedule by a month, I wanted to see how people respond - if at all - to a daily release cycle for prose fiction as opposed to, say, blogs and webcomics.

It's also being released to my homepage at StrangeNoises.org.

Now, remember, this was a NaNoWriMo project. It's primarily an exercise in speed writing at the expense of all other considerations! Some things may not be as well proofed or worked out as might otherwise be the case. For one thing, the entire story concept, while it's been floating around my brain for years, is one I probably would never have decided to actually do were it not for the liberating factor that "it's just a bit of fun for NaNoWriMo" and a bit of a break from The Taken. I hope you enjoy it anyway. This is based upon what was probably the last magical gender transformation fantasy I daydreamed about before I finally decided to take responsibility for what I was and do it the long way. Revisiting it ten years later brings quite a different perspective!

It's not proofed, beyond a quick revision pass by me last night, fixing some continuity errors and what typos I spotted in the process. Please feel free to butt in in the comments and point out where I get stuff wrong, especially if you have expertise in areas I lack and went ahead and wrote about anyway, like the nautical stuff... :-)

I expect I shall write the second and intended-final part sometime in the early part of the new year. I'll probably do my own private novel writing month (PriNoWriMo?) and thus write it under similar conditions to part 1.

Before anyone asks, no, I'm not giving up on The Taken. This is just a break from it; a holiday project if you like. Now the NaNoWriMo month is over, I'll be catching up on the proofer mails of the next chapter of The Taken and look to release the next chapter before Christmas.