It’s Sunday, so here’s a new update for A Round of Words in 80 Days as well as National Novel Writing Month.

It’s all going very well, all things considered. NaNoWriMo is at the halfway mark and I just surpassed 35,000 words, so I am well on track. If I continue like this, I could reach the 50,000 word goal by 23rd November.

So cue the music:

I am writing little bits every day, and as of tomorrow, I will have to show two things I’ve done for my university course as well as two pieces of creative writing to a friend. We’ll do this weekly on Mondays to make sure I am on track with everything.

However, I am totally counting my Frankenstein review as a piece of writing for this week!

I managed to get a friend of mine interested in writing. She’s currently in China, so we won’t be able to get together to write, but she will be doing my free Start Writing Fiction course and we have just decided that the two of us will stage a DecNoWriMo.

Yes, that’s right! We’re doing the whole NaNoWriMo shebang in December! She doesn’t like to start things half way, so we’ll both start writing a new story (maybe even book 3 for me?) on December 1. The goal, as with “normal” NaNoWriMo, is 50,000 words by the end of the month.

We’ll have Skype chats to keep each other on track, and we’ll exchange what we’ve written every other week. She proof-read my 2013 NaNoWriMo novel The Bravery of the Soldier, so we’ll beta read each other’s work.

Tomorrow, I will meet up with a few NaNoWriMo participants from the Leverkusen region. We’ll get together for a Write-In and coffee and I can’t wait to meet other WriMos in person! Let’s just hope my sat nav won’t lead me astray.

On Thursday, I will see Frankenstein again, this time with reverse cast. This week, I saw this 2011 play with Benedict Cumberbatch as The Creature and Jonny Lee Miller as Victor Frankenstein. Next week, the two leads switch roles. The play is one I’ve wanted to see since it’s original London run in 2011 but I was living too far away and couldn’t afford the trip. Thank god for National Theatre Live’s Encore Screenings, which bring a recording of the show to cinemas worldwide!

From Thursday onwards, I will also participate in Throwback Thursdays. I’ve gone through old news clippings of mine and some photography I had published. I realised, I had a few interviews filed away with authors, some reviews and some pictures I took which might inspire others, so I will highlight these old works in Thursdays.

The first Throwback Thursday post is an interview with Bulgarian author Kapka Kassabova from 2009. It’s about her memoir Street Without A Name and was originally published in the run-up to Words by the Water literature festival in Keswick, Cumbria, England. Back then, I was picture editor, contributor and webmaster for the festival’s official magazine Write On! produced by my fellow journalism students and myself at the University of Cumbria, so watch this space!

I will also try to type up a few of my ROW80 writing samples, just to give you a taste of what my writing’s like.

For now, I have a university paper to finish that’s due tomorrow and a flat to clean and tidy.

Check out what the other ROW80 participants are up to!