A NaNoWriMo Gift For You

For those of you who are participating in National Novel-Writing Month (NaNoWriMo), there's a gift for you.

http://www.grammarly.com/blog/2013/beaten-path-nanowrimo-writing-tips/

Since high school I've been reading a lot of how-to-write books and copying the choicest bits into a Word document entitled "General Writing Tips." Grammarly was so kind as to give me a platform to share some of them with those toiling along in the NaNoWriMo fields.

(I'm not doing it myself, but I did edit Battle for the Wastelands to a hopefully more salable 97,000 words and I did manage to write just under 2,000 words so far for The Thing in the Woods, so I've managed something. Maybe I'll finish the Thing first draft by the end of the year.)

I hope the information contained therein is useful to you.

My NaNoWriMo Autopsy

Just as I suspected earlier, I did not succeed at National Novel Writing Month this month. Based on the numbers in my Excel spreadsheet, I wrote approximately 7,660 words, around 15 percent of the 50,000 words those who set out to climb the NaNoWriMo mountain must write.

Now it's time to conduct an autopsy, to see why I did not succeed and what lessons can be learned:

*Work was one of the biggest causes. Although I've made some money with my personal writing, that which makes most of my money should take the top priority.

*For my NaNoWriMo project, I picked a hard SF novel I had already begun writing. That genre is more difficult to write and requires more pre-existing knowledge than, say, a sword-and-sorcery or "New Pulp" novel. My friend Jamie, who "made" NaNoWriMo for the second year in a row, said my not succeeding at NaNoWriMo was understandable if I chose hard SF. I'd written most of the first chapter of a pulp adventure novel in an hour or so at DragonCon this year and that would have been a better NaNoWriMo project.

*If you look at my November blog-posting list, I found a lot of stuff to comment on. Although some of that was very time-sensitive and necessary (like the Starcraft novel review), others perhaps could have been held off on. Part of the issue is that if I run into a block, I often find something easier to do, like post on the blog or message-board. Good for bringing in blog traffic (November was one of the most-trafficked months this year), but not good for finishing a novel.

*I brought the first four chapters to my writing group and spent time revising them rather than simply writing new content. I have reason for this--one of my writing group's more active members is a former petty officer on a submarine who knows significantly more about the Navy than I do and his comments lead to large re-writes. It's better to get problems in earlier chapters fixed to minimize the amount of rewriting later. However good that might be more for the novel as a whole, that contributed to my not making the 50,000.

Oh well. Better luck next year.

First NaNoWriMo Update

Now begins Day Five of National Novel-Writing Month and I will update you with my progress, or lack thereof.

In the first four days, I wrote a grand total of 1,956 words. In and of itself, that's not a bad thing--except in order to meet the "50,000 words in a month" challenge of NaNoWriMo, I would need to write just under 1,700 words per day. This means I should have written 6,700 words so far. In order to be on-track for five days in, I would need to write in the neighborhood of 8,400 words today.

(I have some legitimate justifications here, but excuses buy no yams. I'm still very behind. Meanwhile, I have a friend who is not only meeting his goals, he is actually exceeding them.)

At this rate, I do not think I will be able to make the 50,000 word count. I am not giving up five days into the project--I will still try to write a lot more on what will hopefully be my second completed original novel (and an easier sale, since it will probably be shorter than my first). However, I am being realistic.

On the bright side, those 1,956 words have been rather useful. The first chapter is now complete and I've made significant progress on the second and third. I have committed to bring something to my Lawrenceville writing group for the 11/18 meeting. Since the deadline to submit something is 11/11, I might be able to bring the first three "real" chapters (as opposed to the prologue, which consists of a bunch of future news articles for world-building purposes) before the writing group.

Do novel titles count toward the word count goal? Several thousand words in, and I still don't have a title.

To NaNoWriMo or Not NaNoWriMo?

The other day on Facebook, my friend Lauren Patrick posted a general call-out to several of her writer friends (me included) about whether we would be participating in National Novel-Writing Month, or NaNoWriMo for short. The gist of it is to write 50,000 words in a month. That's a complete novel by some people's metrics, albeit a bit on the short side.

I am seriously considering participating. While I wait to hear back from the first publisher I sent Battle for the Wastelands, my friend James R.Tuck from my Kennesaw writing group recommended that I work on an entirely new project. He said once he wrote the first Deacon Chalk novel Blood and Bullets, he sent it out to agents and publishers and worked on other stuff in the meantime. It wouldn't do to spend all that time writing a sequel and not be able to sell the first novel.

So I started pondering a new project, born out of thoughts I had on how the Star Trek canon could have gone differently. And so a new space opera came to be, a world born of electric cars and fusion power freeing the U.S. from dependence on Middle Eastern oil, of European unification and the fall of Pakistan, and the genetic engineering of humans came. Now the human realm is divided between five Great Powers, all of whom have nuclear and antimatter weapons, spacecraft using inertial confinement fusion, and offworld colonies. It is in that world that a prototype antimatter-propelled spacecraft is lost and an American warship races an Indian one to retrieve it.

(It's much, MUCH more "hard sci fi" than Star Trek will ever be, and it's not nearly as utopian.)

Battle for the Wastelands is 104,000 words long and took me one to two years to write most of it. 104,000 words is a little long for a first novel. Blood and Bullets is around 80,000 words long, as was Wicked as They Come,the debut novel of Delilah S. Dawson. Meanwhile, The Shifter, the debut novel of Janice Hardy, was 70,000 words. My new project, which doesn't yet have a title, would probably be this length if not somewhat shorter.

I told James the other day that if I made Escape from the Wastelands my NaNoWriMo project, I could write 50,000 words and still have a lot more to do. However, if I did my new project instead, I could, if not actually finish it, be pretty darn close. And a shorter novel would be an easier sell than a longer one.

And now that I've described the project in extensive detail on a well-traveled blog, that means I need to get started pronto, lest someone else steal the idea.

To NaNoWriMo! Let's hope I have time!