Today is October first which means… one more month until NaNoWriMo! Yeah, it’s already that time of year again. Scary, huh?
So, despite homework, work, babysitting, whatever else I have going on in real life, I need to buckle down and get myself back into a writing/editing routine so that I can work hard on NaNo.
Before I begin, let me explain this: I was planning on writing Detective Florence 3 for NaNo because I was going to outline that novel as well as finish editing Detective Florence 2 this month. Well, I never even finished typing up the second draft to the first novel. Thus, I never started editing the second novel.
I don’t even know if I’m doing it right, but writing a mystery series is pretty tough. There’s so much information and there are so many plot holes that need to be filled (just like any other genre, but I feel like mystery is worse). There are so many characters to keep track of: bad guys, witnesses, victims, and so on. I do have a good handle on it, but since I’ve gotten far behind from what my schedule originally was (thanks a lot, school) I decided to take a break from it. I might pick it back up in December, but I make no promises to myself at this time.
With that being said… usually the month before a NaNo session I outline (well, try to) whatever I’m going to write for the month. Except now that I decided not to continue on with Detective Florence for the time being, I had no idea what to write.
I looked through my extremely long list of novel ideas and nothing really jumped out at me. I didn’t even know what genre to write. So, I looked through my flash drive and decided to be a “NaNo Rebel” this year and finish something that was already started. Thus, I came across Far Away again.
I thought it might be nice to work on a stand-alone novel for a change so I clicked on it to see where I was. Now, I don’t remember this, but apparently back in January I wrote about 20,500 words of this story. It was about 64 pages long. So, I’m pretty far along in the novel. I just need to read through it to make sure I remember what is going on. Thus, the outline. I’m going to outline Far Away this month so I can finish it for NaNo. Since I’m already 20k words in and my goal for NaNo is 50k, I’m going to have to have Far Away be at least 70k words, which I think won’t be too hard. The good news is, since I’ve already started it, I should be able to finish the manuscript if I meet my goals during November.
Speaking of stand-alone novels… about a month back I decided to work on two projects. One being the Detective Florence series (which since then has changed because I’m going to take a break from it) and the other would be Take Over. Does anyone remember that one?
I wrote it back in April 2013 for Camp NaNo. I decided to work on this because it is a stand-alone novel. I would like to get something worthy of publication soon, and I figured a stand-alone would be the best way to do it. I would like to have it ready by this time next year. So, in addition to outlining Far Away, I’ll be editing Take Over. In order to finish that by the end of the month, I need to edit about eight pages a day. I think that’s reasonable on account I have work and school on top of everything else. If I don’t finish it by the end of the month, it’s no big deal, but at least I’m going to try to have it done by then.
I hope everyone else is going to start getting ready for NaNo. 30 more days! Plus, the first day of November is on a Saturday. I can finish my homework early that week and of course I don’t have work on Saturday, so I’m hoping to make the first day really count!
