NaNoWriMo - The Handyman Day -1

Get set...

Back in 2009 about four months before I finished the first draft of Chasing Innocence, I came up with the idea for another book. It would be about a man who is guided by his wife as he hunts for her killers.

The idea grew in the months and then years it took to bring a polish to Chasing Innocence. I started writing it in 2011. I abandoned it in 2012 after it had turned into an unwieldy mess of a political thriller I had no desire to write.

The concept of a man hunting for his wife's killer has stayed strong in my mind and continued to push for a way out. Two months ago while on holiday in Cyprus I'd just finished reading Truman Capote's 'In Cold Blood'. A whole bunch of ideas came together and suddenly the solution to writing The Handyman came to me. It would have to be a story focused entirely on the protagonist throughout. It would have to stay tight to him and resist all attempts to get large.

Unfortunately this meant most of the originally abandoned draft of the book, save for a few early scenes between the man and his wife, would have to be shelved. I also needed to balance my desire to get Handyman out of my head and not derail my schedule for Hunting Demons - the sequel to Chasing Innocence I'd been writing during the summer.

I read an article about National Novell Writing Month, which is an annual event where writers from all over the world try to write a 50-60k book in November. While writing Hunting Demons in October I started outlining the revised HandyMan with a plan of devoting all of November to writing it.

The outline is mostly done and November beckons. I'm super excited and will be posting every day during November with excerpts and word counts and maybe even some of my favourite bits from the first draft.

You can follow me on Twitter using the tag of #thehandyman, which will also contain daily links to posts and in the trenches updates.

Here's a quick synopsis of The Handyman that will be:

A veteran of two middle-east wars is guided by his wife as he hunts for her murderer 

Veteran soldier Daniel Harper’s wife and step-daughter are gunned down during a family holiday in the New Forest. A released video of their murder states they were killed for his crimes as a soldier in the middle-east. 

Daniel’s unique skills are deployed to hunt down the cell responsible. As he delivers justice to each in turn he is plagued by repeating dreams of his wife, dreams that lead him away from revenge to look elsewhere for her true killers.

Good luck to my fellow NaNoWriMo participants. I'm going in. Writing will commence at midnight tonight, just to get the ball rolling.

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