12.04.2009

NaNoWriMo and "The High Bridge"


Well, I’m back to the blog after a very hectic NaNoWriMo whirlwind project.

As I mentioned before, I’ve never written a novel in a month before. I’ve spent a month (many, actually) doing straight writing, but to have a set goal within a specific timeframe is an entirely new subject to me.

I’m happy to say that I was successful! On November 20th, I hit the 50,000 wordcount required to “win” the National Novel Writing Month ‘contest’, and on November 25th, I wrote my last line of the project bringing it to a count of 61,000+. There are drafts and then there are ROUGH drafts, and anything coming out of a NaNoWriMo wordrace is going to be very rough indeed. It should be. The point is to write, write, write and write some more, right? Well, since writing that last line, I’ve been doing a lot of editing and at the moment, the manuscript is up to ~ 68,000. Unless I come up with some genius idea, I don’t think I’ll get far beyond 70K.

And that’s fine.

In the past thirty-some-odd years, I've written a lot of things, from FanFict to Sci-Fi to Historic Romance, but this is the first time I've written anything that I feel might be publishable. Now is when writing gets scary. Now is when I have to learn how to sell myself. It's like a job interview for your dream job, only ten times as important. If you don't do well in a regular job interview, you can somewhat write it off as "you weren't exactly the right candidate for the job". If your manuscript is rejected, it's like being told that your baby is so ugly, they're willing to put it to death for you.

And here I thought I never wanted kids...