Going Solo

I read Roald Dahl's first autobiography, Boy, when I was myself a boy, loads of times, as I did with nearly everything that Dahl wrote. Matilda was my favourite and still is, but BFG, The Twits, The Witches, Fantastic Mr Fox and all the others were on my bookshelf and very worn out. I actually had Boy in a double edition with his continuing adventures, Going Solo, but for some reason I never read that one. I'm sure I remember starting it once, thinking it was boring, and never going back to it. What a young fool I was! Going Solo is just as exciting as anything else the great man ever wrote, and it's really interesting to see how his little details from his experiences as a young man served as obvious inspiration for his later books. The book is split roughly into two parts, the first chronicling his adventures as a Shell rep living in Africa, and the second detailing his time flying for the RAF during the Second World War. This is the best stuff, it's almost a real-life Catch-22 as Dahl somehow survives the insanity of the British war operation in the Mediterranean, including such crackpot plans as being sent to join a squadron at an airfield that doesn't exist, and taking on the might of a 100-strong Luftwaffe squadron in Greece with the help of only eight other RAF planes. Reading all this, it's miraculous that Dahl survived to write his wonderful stories, and the world is lucky that he did.

I'm getting on well with my NaNoWriMo challenge. I wrote every day for twelve days in a row which was very tiring but very worth it. I was up to within 1000 words of where I should have been, but was too busy on the weekend to do any more so I'm now back to 3000 behind. I've done over 30,000 words now though, and I've got Thursday and Friday off work so I'm hoping to catch up then. My novel is about a boy who's very shy, but follows a salesman and learns the art of manipulating people through his words and actions, moves to Los Angeles when he turns sixteen, and eventually becomes the leader of a cult. It's vaguely planned out but I'm sure there are lots of twists and turns hiding in my brain that will jump out when I least expect them. Hopefully when I read it back at the end of the month a title will leap out at me, because at the moment I've got no idea what it should be called.