I’ve now written 20,498 words as part of my NaNoWriMo effort this year. The needed amount to stay on target for today is 20,004 words – so I am right on par.

That sounds better than it is in reality, however, since the last few days, writing has been a real struggle and I failed my goal a couple of times. So far, I’ve managed to make up for it, but I do not feel comfortable scraping along just above the needed amount of words. A few slip ups without immediately making up for them will let you fall off the wagon quickly and my previous NaNoWriMo experience tells me that once you reach that point, it’s all over. Therefore, I’m aiming at getting ahead at least one day’s worth of writing or more, if possible. That way, I’d have a bit of a safety blanket. I really want to win the challenge again this year.

In some thoroughly good news, however, I’ve now just about doubled the total length of the book!

I’ve added quite a lot of background information on characters, places and organisations in the novel to the new repository of world building information on the site. It’s finally reached the point where all of this information is too much for me to keep in my head, so I thought I might as well make it accessible to everyone.

I’m happy to announce that this project has received a grant from the federal government here in Germany. The German copyright collection agency for writers, VG Wort, and the Commissioner for Culture and Media of the federal government have created the programme Neustart Kultur to promote writers in the wake of the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic. As part of this programme, I have received a grant of €5000 over four months (the grant period started on 30 October). More specifically, I have received €4500 now and will get another €500 if I reach my goal for the grant, which is to finish the novel. I think it is pretty cool that they considered my project, even though I’m writing the novel in English and only plan to translate it to German later.

In order to facilitate me reaching the goal under this grant, I have joined NaNoWriMo again this year. It perfectly fell together with the start of the grant, after all. In case you aren’t aware, the National Novel Writing Month (or NaNoWriMo) is a global community of people trying to put 50,000 words to paper during the month of November. I won it once in 2011, while still at university in Bonn, and binned the novel. I entered GRIM DEEP in 2018 and in 2019 and failed miserably both times. Maybe this year, motivated by the grant and the ten-year-anniversary of my original win, I can pull it off. If you have a NaNoWriMo account, you can follow my efforts on my profile on the website. I also plan to provide updates on my progress via my Twitter account.

As you can obviously see for yourself, I’ve decided to overhaul the entire website for this project. When I launched the original site a couple of years ago, the idea was to simply have a place where you could read parts of GRIM DEEP while I was writing the novel. But recently, I’ve found myself looking for a place to document my world building for the project and eventually decided the best idea would be to do that publicly, right alongside the novel. The result is this new, slightly more involved design for the website.

The new setup also gave me the opportunity to include posts on the homepage of the site and I decided to go for this. Which means from here on out, short updates here on the blog will keep you in the loop on what’s been going on with the writing and publishing efforts in relation to the book. I might also share other relevant details concerning the project once in a while, we shall see…