I forgot to participate last year. Must make sure my gaming club leaves me along during between October and December so I can plan and write... The prize is a winner's certificate, icons, banners and all sorts of similar little goodies. I don't think they did for all of the winners, but a few people also got bound copies of their stories. I know at least two people who got a copy professionally printed and bound. They were also offering some lucky people a bit of help in getting published, no news if any of that went anywhere though.
I wrote the first 50k odd words of a trilogy I'm writing based on a simple fact that I found out. That being that 275,000 Britons go missing each year. Let me repeat that. 275 THOUSAND. This means that the entire population of Plymouth vanishes each year, or to put it another way, one person every two minutes is just gone. Obviously most of these people are found extremely fast, these being things like kids being out late and parents worrying, someone sleeping on a friends sofa after an argument, people separating and not telling their partner they are leaving etc. There's also the fact that at any given time there are on average 1000 unclaimed unidentified bodies in hospital morgues across the county. However even if you take into account the people who are found quickly, the ones who are going missing deliberately, and those who are never claimed, it still leaves a VERY rough estimated five thousand to ten thousand that are never heard from again in any way, shape, or form. I took a very small number of that population and combined it with the fact that mankind has always used caves to create a non-magical, non-fantasy setting where some of these people have created they own society. The society dating back to the Roman era. Their hidden society first used caves. Jump forward to the Victorian era, and you have them still hidden, only now they're using sewers. Today they are using sewers cellars, abandoned tube stations, or simply anywhere underground. This society being run by a dictatorial council of twelve people who inherit they position from their family bloodlines. As for can you read it - well, when it's finished and IF I can get it published I'll send you a link to your closest bookstore.
its basically just banners, icons etc but its also the fact when you win you know you've written 50k words in a month something that's a lot harder then it sounds.
The trilogy sounds really interesting, you'll definitely have to let us all know when you complete it and get published!
I can imagine, sounds like it could have a lot of good complex scenes throughout the trilogy. At the moment I'm currently brainstorming the second part to a series of novels, so when I'm writing up book one the story will flow towards the events that'll take place in the next part. I'm taking a fair bit of time working it all out though, as I want the books to be relevant as stand-alone novels along with having enough relevance to tie the plots together into the larger plot of the series. These stats may be of interest to anyone who's into the NaNoWriMo: http://blog.nanowrimo.org/post/70195837979/nanowrimo-2013-by-the-numbers
Don't be silly. I'm storing them in the freezer before selling them to Tesco's as ingredients for lasagne
