How's Your Word Count?

Everyone knows November is National Novel Writing Month. (How are your words?). But did you know that it's also National Non Fiction November?  'the whole month now celebrates all those readers that have a passion for information and facts and attempts to bring non fiction celebration in line with those of fiction.' To join in with the Federation of Children's Book Groups' 'annual celebration of all things factual' we have some posts on a non-fiction theme.

If all goes to plan our first will be tomorrow. I have a terrible feeling I agreed this for last week  but I had a laptop meltdown just before the conference and emails I was sure I had have disappeared - another #mysteryoftheInternet.

Isn't Nancy doing a great job?  I'm so grateful for her stepping up. Here's her last week's editorial in case you missed it. Nancy is looking for thoughts on year three's monthly themes - if you have any thoughts about what you'd like to see in W&P please do get in touch at editor@britishscbwi.org.

I'm so looking forward to our Advent Calendar this year. Paul has a beautiful collection of seasonal illustrations - thank you illustrators!  After this month of many words, get your microfiction brains in gear for tweetable stories  to go with them. As last year, we'll be inviting these in the December post comments and then tweeting them!

This week Candy celebrated Piers Torday's Guardian Children's Fiction Prize win - thank you Candy and again congratulations to you for being among such a select list of nominees!

Last week we celebrated Anne-Marie's SCBWI Outstanding Contribution Award and today I'm so pleased  to be able to share the video of Anne Marie receiving it!



Here are the other highlights from last week you may have missed:

• More conferency blog breaking from Nick
• Celia's brilliant interview with Mairi Kidd of Barrington Stoke. There's so much insightful content in this post from Mairi and Celia
• Network News from the South West - if you need any ideas for what to get up to in your network, check this post from Lesley Moss - the SW have done them all!
• An illustrator's conference round up from John - just see what fun things you non-illustrators may have missed at the conference.

Coming soon:

• Some non-fiction thoughts from me 
• An interview with Melvin Burgess from Philippa
• A report on the Conference Non-Fiction Panel from Anita
• A conference report on the Writing for Reluctant Readers session from Janet
• A new ProCatsination from Jion

It's week three, Wrimos! In theory this should be the home stretch but more likely the quagmire of the muddled middle - head up and keep going!

I'm 8000 words behind.

Hey ho, hope it's a great week anyway,

Jan Carr

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Jan Carr is the editor of Words & Pictures. Her fiction is all over the place, she blogs occasionally and loves to write in magenta. You can contact her at editor@britishscbwi.org.