Sheila and Sara

I can spend an afternoon reading my manuscript from beginning to end, making a few cuts and rewrites as I go, taking notes of which scenes need some serious reworking and then end up feeling vaguely weird and guilty, like I should have been doing something productive .

One of the common myths that stands between people and completed manuscripts is the myth of 'time.' I'm sure you've heard it. "If I just had the time , I'd be able to Write My Novel." But our time is a limited resource, consumed by forty-hour-a-week jobs with hour commutes each way and all the other obligations of the business of living. If only, one sighs, one could have time to oneself, time to write without all those pesky distractions, then one could finally write that novel that one has been promising oneself that one would, one day. One is, of course, bullshitting oneself. The beautiful thing that NaNoWriMo did for me--and, I'm sure for many others--is thoroughly debunk that myth. The raw material for the novel I'm trying to hammer into a publishable form was drafted in the space of two separate months of do-or-die typing (supplemented with some scribbling to allow me to keep the plot on track) while still holding down a job and everyt...

It's about eighty thousand words, give or take, at this point. Since the full arc of the story is still in an odd state of flux, I don't feel fully comfortable explaining what it's 'about' to people.  But I am now at a point where I'm willing to at least tell people how the story begins, since I've read the opening scene aloud at a few events and it looks to be one of the firmly anchored points of the thing.  And it seems to serve well to give an impression of the kind of story I'm hoping to tell. The narrator, June, is sitting in the Majestic, a 24-hour diner that's an Atlanta institution, having just wandered up the street from seeing her favorite local band at the 10 High.  She realizes that her wallet is not in her pocket.  She decides to sit tight for a bit, digs up enough pocket change to pay for a cup of coffee and when the guy behind the counter asks her if she wants anything, she explains that she can't find her wallet. "It's in...

One of the tricky things, I'm discovering, about revising a NaNo draft into presentable form is culling out the parts that I threw in simply for the sake of wordcount.  I've hacked out several scenes already and just tonight I decided that the story really ended about eight thousand words before I stopped typing.  So out they went.  The resultant ending is a touch abrupt, but further revisions should allow it to flow more naturally. The manuscript has dropped down to approximately 78,000 words in total.  I have a few other scenes in mind for the cutting room floor as well, and they can depart more easily now that the extended ending has been lopped off. It's almost like finding the statue in the block of marble--chipping away the extraneous material to get to the story I'm trying to tell.  I'm not sure if this is an optimal method for a working writer, but since I still remain in the ranks of hobbyists, I suppose it will have to do.  It at least feels better, as I t...

Sometimes I wonder what the heck I think I'm doing with this novel. Lots of people, of course, dream of being professional writers.  I've wanted to be one pretty much since childhood, when I discovered that people could write stories for a living.  My parents, avid readers themselves, encouraged me on this path, but suggested I have some useful talent in the back pocket to support myself whilst establishing myself as a fiction writer. Unfortunately, I didn't really put that advice to much use.  I graduated with my shiny Creative Writing degree into the 1992 recession and jounced madly from a vague attempt at a journalism degree to an even vaguer attempt at an MFA with a number of odd jobs in between. Since I spent a lot of time in science fiction geekdom, I moved in the circles of science fiction/fantasy/horror writers of varying levels of success.  The general expectation in that particular genre is that one starts with short stories and then gets published in enough place...

I did, in fact, make it.  Barely.  I was vexed by the fact that the site temporarily went down in my final stretch of Sunday afternoon wordcount, and when I resorted to what Word told me the wordcount was, it lied to me.  Or, at least, exaggerated a bit compared to what the NaNoWriMo site decreed. So I pasted what Word told me was 50,000 words and the robots counted and spat back the number 49,911.  Ouch.  And I had come to a pretty good line to end on, so I didn't want to drag it on beyond that.  Fortunately, we live in an age where backing up and inserting things is a matter of a few points of the mouse.  (How did people manage to write novels on typewriters?  What did they do when you needed to add a whole new paragraph on page 98?  I shudder to think of it.)  So I took a few scenes that had been written in haste (given that was, well, nearly all of them, it didn't take much digging to find such) and added some marginally more detailed descriptions.  I nudged the word count ...

. . . and it's only day four.  Not bad. I have a class tomorrow night, so I prolly won't get as much done.  But I've got a comfortable lead to fall back on. And I can sleep a little more soundly tonight, I think, for other reasons . . .