Seeing as we’re nearing the middle of the month and I’ve not updated with anything substantial in over a week, I thought I’d better break my silence.

Reading this month has really suffered due to the thing that is NaNoWriMo, for those not in the know, that’s National Novel Writing Month. Where writers the world over put their well-exercised fingers to the test and write 50k on a new story for the entire month of November, breaking it up into roughly 1667 a day. And, thus, I embarked on writing another story that, while featuring orcs, was so far out of my comfort zone I have since been questioning all my life choices up until this point.

As of writing this post, I am at the 21k mark. I am stressing about where the other 29k will come from and how to pad out my story so that it reaches the much-desired 50k. Of course, the aim of NaNoWriMo isn’t to finish the month with a fully fleshed novel, but a rough draft of something to edit and pour over the next couple of months.

My novel is called ‘There’s an Orc in my Court,’ and is a convoluted mess of romance, smut, mystery and historical. Is there such a genre as Historical Fantasy? I don’t know, but I’ve certainly taken influence from a certain era of history.

What’s in the AI?

On a particularly dreary day during Half Term, I discovered Midjourney an AI art generator that users can prompt to create all manner of things.

So, naturally, I simply put “Orc Portrait” in as a prompt during my free beta – which generated a handful of options. The one above sparked my imagination and I ran with it.

With the use of AI, I was able to generate the visual of a character that sparked off an idea for NaNoWriMo; something I’d have struggled to do otherwise – not that coming up with characters is hard – but sometimes an image or sentence just speaks to you and you have to run with it. Or, time constraints are difficult; I only decided to embark on NaNoWriMo a day or so beforehand, thinking I’d rather use that time to work on Orcs of Valkurk instead but then the idea took hold and wouldn’t let go!

I am aiming to finish the first draft by the end of the month, then sit on it for a good few weeks during December and pick it up with fresh eyes again in January/February time.