I shall muse a bit. Pull up a chair and settle yourself into it. This may go on a while.
I have successfully stuffed enough words into my latest manuscript to “win” NaNoWriMo this year. Yay!
What did I win? I hear you ask. Well, I am sitting here sorting through that very question myself.
I got a nifty certificate that I can use to line my parrot’s cage. (Note to self: purchase a parrot)
I gained access to a page of much swag that I can get. (To roll around in, if I wish to do that sort of thing.)
And I have a whole fifty thousand written words that I now need to figure out what to do with. Let me explain.
I have a completely different view of the writing process than the one that NaNoWriMo promotes. Their stated idea and mindset is that you just need to get a first draft done, willy nilly. And then you have something you can polish.
I don’t write that way. I used to, but no longer. My way is that when I am finished typing my first draft, it is the final draft. I will check for typos and fix egregious errors in syntax or such. But actually rewriting is a full on no-no.
I write clean first drafts. If anyone is interested I can talk about that another time, but that’s not what this post is about.
So I went into the NaNoWriMo challenge this year with the intention of having a FINISHED novel, on November 30th.
Didn’t happen.
So … let me tell you what did …
Feast your eyes upon this here screenshot.
You can click on it to see it bigger, but I don’t see any point to that.
So as you can see, I was running along fairly consistently, albeit a little low, up until day fifteen. Then the holidays started to impact my writing. People were visiting, and things had to be done. Many distractions. I still had plenty of time everyday to write, but I just didn’t. I allowed myself to be distracted. My fault.
The complete flatline was while my step-daughter’s son was here. He’s lots of fun. Ray Bradbury said that when he was writing Fahrenheit 451, he actually went to the local library, and used one of their coin-operated typewriters. Because if he stayed home, he just wanted to spend time with his kids.
I get that.
So, about the 26th, they left and I got back to it. I deliberately tried to pick up the pace. Around the 27th I was questioning whether I should even try. (as you can tell be the two day flatline. )
Although that second day I was writing like a monkey on amphetamines. I just didn’t upload until after midnight so it didn’t show up that day.
The progress was therefore …
I wrote the first twenty-six thousand words in my normal fashion. They are finished. They are well written.
The last twenty-four thousand were, to say the least, hurried. They are not finished, nor well written. They will need a lot of work.
So, what shall I do? and what have I learned?
Second question first.
I have learned that my self discipline sucks ass. I need to work on that. I am trying to develop my writing into a daily come-hell-or-high-water habit. I only re-started my writing seriously a couple months ago. When I say a couple that could be six. I’m like a dog when it comes to tracking time.
I have yet to achieve habit. I still need to make myself sit down to write. But it’s getting better.
What shall I do?
Turns out, not surprisingly to me, that the novel I started for NaNo was not a fifty thousand word novel. Judging by how everything laid itself out, it seems as though it’ll weigh in at about the seventy thousand word mark.
This is my first novel, so I won’t know for sure until the ending shows up. But it’s absolutely more than fifty thousand is my point.
Those rushed, final twenty-four thousand words? Don’t know what will happen to them. Maybe I can salvage some of them. Maybe not.
I’m guessing a little bit of both.
Which brings me to exactly where Nano wanted me in the first place. With an unpublishable manuscript that will need a lot of work.
C’est la vie
That work will not commence immediately. Because while I was slaving away over a hot Mac, feverishly typing my metaphoric ass off, I was getting tons of ideas for other stories.
So, for this next week of cool down, I will be writing anything at all that is not this novel.
Just for a week. That should be enough.
Then I shall return to it, guns blazing, free of the NaNo albatross and tearing into it on my own terms. Nothing between me and my story but this keyboard.
This means that I shall be pushing back my original publication date from the middle of December, to sometime in January. That’s fine. It’ll be a way better book, anyway.
Will I do it again next year? You bet.
Will I actually buy a parrot? Probably not. They live too long. And, frankly, they kind of creep me out. But if I ever come into possession of one, I’ve got the paper!