In the meantime, there has been some learning lessons by me and this is a quick documentation of those, from a wholey personal perspective -

• Although I need background music / television / radio etc whilst doing prep and planning work (and the subsequent post-work after the novel) I’ve found I write best and more deeply when the world is as quiet as I can make it. I’ve not watched television for over a month now, other than at night once finished the writing day.
  
• I started off writing on the main family PC in the study. This should have been a good environment to write in, all setup with everything needed. Somehow, after the first week of the month, I drifted more and more to taking a copy of the work in progress off onto a USB drive, and swapping it onto the laptop. By the end of the month, that’s how I ended up writing - solely on the laptop, on my lap, plugged into the electrics, and sitting in an armchair or on a couch in the living room, looking out some french doors to all that was going on in my back garden. I need scenery, it seems, to allow myself to look up and think.
• I can’t make inspiration happen - no matter if I walk around the lake on a dog walk, or am half asleep in the evening, both thinking about (churning over) the novel I am breathing and eating all day. For a while I thought all that thinking was a waste of time, because nothing ever popped into my mind at the time; no resolutions to a problem, no plot twists that took me where I’d not planned to go. But the time outs, allowed to become thinking / churning times do provide value - later on. When I wake up and I’ve suddenly got a plausible resolution, or when I’m sitting in a car somewhere and something does occur to me.
  
• I lost some of those inspirations, and had to re-engineer them the next day. At the time I thought to myself - great idea, I’ll certainly remember that one. And yet, they drifted off just like that. I still haven’t developed the discipline in myself, despite every writer saying you should do this, to actually always have a notebook or journal around me. I don’t know why I rebel against it, but currently I do. So I’m writing it down here - life would be much easier as a writer for me to have a notebook about my person, bedside, lugged around by the dog, whatever…
• Writing is tough work. No surprises there. But I put in a full day’s work, plus the domestics, school chores, and external work I needed to do, and although I have not forgotten what it’s like to be a fultime office worker with long commutes home, this is different - and worse again. Writing never leaves you when you start dinner, or walk around the supermarket. It’s never not there, and constantly just behind your eyes sitting there ready to come out of your mind at the most inopportune moments. It’s exhausting, tiring and tough physically also. Your neck hurts, arms and fingers hurt from all that typing. Or perhaps that’s just because I’m a driven person, but I can understand those writers who spend only three hours per day on it, and deliver a book a year. Still, it’s the toughest work I’ve ever attempted. And it’s nice to rest a little now that something like that has been achieved.
• I’m a Planning Freak. I planned just about every scene / plot or subplot I needed beforehand, for a month, and this actually saved my bacon on several occasions, because it allowed me to know what the end goal was, and filled in some spaces where I seriously didn’t know what to do.  However, I also allowed my characters to pull me into scenes and plot turns which I’d never contemplated, causing a rejig of the planned for scenes. They took over and surprised me many times. Scenes were written I never expected, and others I thought important initially never worked out. For me, Pre-Planning then Flexibility seems the way to go.
  
• I enjoy planning beforehand and over the novel creation the most. Not the actual writing. And I enjoy the incentives of having a timeframe and wordcount target as a challenge to meet and push myself. I work well in that very confined timeframe (this is not to suggest the quality of the novel is anything at all). So I’m going to try it all again in November during the offical NaNoWriMo month, and join up. Originally I had another idea for a different novel. It’s been lost in the detritus of this Pod Novel, but I’m going to raise it up again, develop it over the course of the next month, so that it’s ready for November. In between, I’ll edit the first draft of the Pod Novel, and no doubt add to my own learnings.
  

The First Draft was finished, half an hour ago, on a lovely spring day where we brought some big pots out of overwintering in the glasshouse, planted up herb planters, baskets and wall hangers with petunias, fushias and one banana plant, and as I put the finishing touches to the final scene, I looked up to discover we have a great tit nest in a clump of ivy on one of our walls, just feet away from the position I’ve taken lately with my laptop.

It’s Day 33, so I cheated by three days, and at 155,000 words, overshot the normal Nanowrimo target by 300%. Call me an overachiever!

 There’s much I still want to do, of course. Like celebrate, for instance! But I’ll make do with pizza and chips tonight, and get some champagne tomorrow from the supermarket. And I had real problems with that final chapter, the big exposition scene - I’ve worked on it for three days and it’s still not right, but after reading and re-reading, I found I was questioning it all far too much, and it started to look like the writing of an incompetent amateur, which - admittedly, I am!

But, rather than go back, I’ve promised myself to tuck it away in a dark cupboard and let the pod fester. Then the editing to second draft, or complete annihilation of the monster I created will take place. Probably in late June or July. We’ll see.

Now, I’m going to back up everything, save to another PC, and spend an early night in bed, catching up with T.V. recordings and actually reading a novel finally. What a relief!