97,769 words . . .

It's a start.  I have now officially fused my past two NaNoWriMo efforts into a unified manuscript.

For those of you wondering how 50,000-odd words plus another 50,000-odd words adds up to less than 100,000 words, allow me to clarify.  My NaNo 2006 effort (Soft Places) was written in the form of diary entries by the narrator.  (I even dated the entries contemporaneously, and threw in things that were happening at the time.)  The 2007 NaNo (The Things Behind the Sun) was written in first person present tense (though I did include references to the narrator continuing to write things down in her diary.)

I decided, ultimately, to do the entire thing in first person present tense.  This meant I had to take the diary entries and rewrite them accordingly.  At first, I was trying too hard to rewrite and perfect everything as I go, then I decided it would be faster and more effective to just cut, paste, redo the verbs and do a little rewriting here and there to smooth the transitions.

So I have finally, as of tonight, completed that process.  I have a relatively unified manuscript of 97,769 words, according to the Word Count function on Microsoft Word.

It still needs work.  A lot of it.  I'm not going to go into a great deal of detail about what the book is about (it's about ninety-eight thousand words, at this point, and that's all you're really getting out of me) but I'll continue, I hope, to talk about the process as I go.

There are still many things about it I'm not 100% happy with, things that I plowed on past on the first pass because, hell, it's NaNo, just get the words out and fix it later.  (That's another reason the word count dropped slightly on the rewrite--there were quite a few things I decided to go ahead and excise while I was at it.)  But at the same time, it feels good to be able to talk about The Manuscript I'm Working On instead of about This Neat Idea I Have For A Novel.

I've also taken the first 3,000 or so words and submitted them to a writing workshop that's going to be held at Orbital 2008, a writerly sci-fi type convention that's being held in the UK.  (I'm flying all the way from Atlanta, Georgia, because one of the guests is Tanith Lee, who is one of my favorite living authors in the history of the written word.)  It should be genuinely interesting to see what someone who isn't familiar with the places I'm describing will think of it.

So.  Well.  There we are.  Now, if you'll excuse me, I have to run around in circles and jump up and down for a bit.