NaNoWriMo 2011 is now officially over, and somehow I officially won! Not sure how that happened, but I’ve got my writing groove on and I’m ready to get right back to the diary challenge and make a really good go at it before the year ends. I’m further behind than I’d care to work out, so let’s not worry about that for now and just keep going forward :).

It won’t have escaped your notice that there’s some kind of celebration coming up. Can’t think what that’s all about, but apparently it’s kind of a big deal. So, the challenge for this month (or at least the first 24 days of it) is to create a Christmas/holiday story advent calendar. We want a very short story (or script, or advert, or poem, or song, or blog post, or anything at all you can think of) for each day of advent. Any format, any genre, any characters you like. I hope this is going to be fun and I don’t end up running out of ideas after the first couple of days!

Optional prompts for this week are:

Thursday 1st December – use the title ‘First Christmas*’ for a piece in any format

Friday 2nd December – write something inspired by your favourite Christmas carol

Saturday 3rd December – I’ve always wondered about the people who write the poems in Christmas cards. Write a story about one of them.

Sunday 4th December – script an advert for a Christmas product or service

*note – you may want to write about a different religious celebration, a different time in history, or a different world where they don’t have Christmas, so whenever I say ‘Christmas’ feel free to substitute with holiday name of choice :).

That’s all for now! Be back next week for more prompts and some musings about what next year will have in store…