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I shall muse a bit. Pull up a chair and settle yourself into it. This may go on a while.<\/p>\nI shall muse a bit. Pull up a chair and settle yourself into it. This may go on a while.<\/p>\n
I have successfully stuffed enough words into my latest manuscript to “win” NaNoWriMo this year. Yay!<\/p>\n
What did I win? I hear you ask. Well, I am sitting here sorting through that very question myself.<\/p>\n
I got a nifty certificate that I can use to line my parrot’s cage. (Note to self: purchase a parrot)<\/p>\n
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.)<\/p>\n
And I have a whole fifty thousand written words that I now need to figure out what to do with. Let me explain.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
So I went into the NaNoWriMo challenge this year with the intention of having a FINISHED<\/strong><\/em> novel, on November 30th.<\/p>\n Didn’t happen.<\/p>\n So … let me tell you what did …<\/p>\n Feast your eyes upon this here screenshot.<\/p>\n You can click on it to see it bigger, but I don’t see any point to that.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n I get that.<\/p>\n 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. )<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n The progress was therefore …<\/p>\n I wrote the first twenty-six thousand words in my normal fashion. They are finished. They are well written.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n So, what shall I do? and what have I learned?<\/p>\n Second question first.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n I have yet to achieve habit. I still need to make myself sit down to write. But it’s getting better.<\/p>\n What shall I do?<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n Those rushed, final twenty-four thousand words? Don’t know what will happen to them. Maybe I can salvage some of them. Maybe not.<\/p>\n I’m guessing a little bit of both.<\/p>\n Which brings me to exactly where Nano wanted me in the first place. With an unpublishable manuscript that will need a lot of work.<\/p>\n C’est la vie<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n So, for this next week of cool down, I will be writing anything at all that is not<\/em><\/strong> this novel.<\/p>\n Just for a week. That should be enough.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n Will I do it again next year? You bet.<\/p>\n Will I actually buy\u00a0 a\u00a0 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!<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" 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. … Continue reading “The Dust Settles”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-61","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dickwrites.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/61","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dickwrites.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dickwrites.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dickwrites.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dickwrites.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=61"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"https:\/\/dickwrites.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/61\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":72,"href":"https:\/\/dickwrites.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/61\/revisions\/72"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dickwrites.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=61"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dickwrites.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=61"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dickwrites.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=61"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"\"](\"https:\/\/dickwrites.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/12\/nanoGraph-1024x439.png\")
<\/p>\n