Painting by Susan Alison

It’s NaNoWriMo month!

First of November is ‘National Author’s Day’, too — to celebrate those who “… sit down at a typewriter and open a vein …” (Ernest Hemingway) to provide some means of escapism from all the dreck the world throws up.

(Thank heaven it’s no longer the typewriter, though. I love my keyboard!)

National Novel Writing Month began in 1999 as a daunting but straightforward challenge: to write 50,000 words of a novel in…