Monday, October 23, 2017

The Short and the Long of It

Short Fiction - 0
Long Fiction - 3548
Poetry - 187
Total Words - 3735
Editing Hours - 0
Paragraphs of Notes - 3

The short version is that I missed my wordage goal by about 1500 words but I’m going to be doing NaNo anyway.

The long version is...I don’t know what I was doing last week, but apparently it wasn’t writing. The words are there, I can feel them, and I know pretty much what’s going to happen between now and the end of the book, but knowing and doing are two very different things.

And that’s when it hit me. Every year I go through a writing slump in the weeks leading up to NaNo. The closer I get to November 1, the less I write. It’s almost like my brain is saving up the words to spew them forth in November.

Decision made, I picked my novel and even came up with a working cover for it (to go with the working title).



The story is actually the sequel to my first NaNo novel, which was an utter failure (although it did spawn ideas for two sequels and one prequel). The book was finished at 35,000 words with a week of NaNo left to go. It being my first book and all, I had no clue what I could do to make it longer. Who knows, maybe it doesn’t need to be any longer - as I recall it was pretty action packed.

I’m probably setting myself up for failure, but the lure of NaNo is too strong to resist. This doesn’t mean I’ll be giving up on Wandering Wizards, I’ll be working on both novels at the same time. You know, just to make things interesting.

Think it can’t be done? Never under estimate the power of determination. I know people who’ve done twice and even three times the required 50,000 words in the month of November. I even know people who’ve knocked off their 50,000 in the first week. I’m pretty sure they lived alone and were fed intravenously, but they did it.

At least my office will be more or less back together by then. We got the futon dismantled and stashed away (you can read more about that HERE if you like) over the weekend and the hubby made the inserts for the upper desk drawers. I need to clean the carpet and shuffle the furniture around, but the desk itself is where I want it to be and I can plug away at the rest as time permits.

So this week the focus will be both working on getting my office set up and getting as many words in on Wandering Wizards as I can manage.

Oh! And since my inbox hasn’t exactly been flooded with stories, poems, and articles inspired by my picture prompt, guess I’d better get on something for that too, eh?

A writer’s work is never done. ;-)

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