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Hello everyone.

It’s another week in the post-NaNoWriMo world, and I’m still in the midst of writing the first draft to Between the Maws & Claws. This has been an odd time writing. I feel like I’m back in college, not in my freshman year, not in my senior year, closer to the end than the start, but still feeling like the end is nowhere in sight.

I think some of this just has to do with the time of the year. The end of the year is always a bit of a struggle for me, and I do feel that my writing isn’t escaping this. I’m very anal retentive in trying to keep things ordered and compartmentalized, and I always prefer to have things that I’m working on get wrapped up by the end of the year. I really like having the sense of a fresh start to each new year with everything.

Last year, I was trying to wrap up finishing listening to Words of Radiance, part two in The Stormlight Archives by Brandon Sanderson, and I still had about 20 hours to listen to going into the final week of the year, as well as trying to finish Dragon Quest XI, a long RPG, and for fun, in the final week I decided to start playing Shovel Knight again with the goal of beating it. Everything felt like a rush at the end of the year to complete everything.

This year, everything’s a bit more laid back. I’m in the process of finishing Rhythm of War, book four in The Stormlight Archives, with a much more manageable amount to listen to that I’ve got plenty of time to finish, and I’ve still got the first draft to finish, with a week’s vacation to end the year and focus on it.

I know that this seems like I should have it pretty easy compared to last year, and I definitely do. But last year, one of the things I wasn’t trying to wrap up before the new year was the completion of a first draft. I feel like this is just another sign that participating in future NaNoWriMo’s isn’t going to be a given, as I don’t like the idea of feeling the pressure to finish before the end of the year when I’m working on a crucial first draft. 

If I expect my manuscript is going to be novella length, as it was with I’m Not My Father, I expect NaNoWriMo is the perfect time to tackle it. But if I’m going to be writing something that’s going to be closer to the average length of a book, I believe I’ll be giving myself an earlier start in the year to make sure I accomplish it with plenty of time to spare.

The goods news is this past week hasn’t been completely negative. I’ve experienced a rush of new story ideas that I feel are promising and really want to sit down to write. Although it never works out this way, I really like the concepts and could see them being the next books that I release, and as a writer, you never feel like you have enough of these.

Happy holidays everyone.

Until next time.

Hello everyone.

Welcome to life after NaNoWriMo. I think you’ll find its very similar to life during NaNoWriMo.

Although the writing competition is over, I still have a manuscript to finish. I feel that I made it approximately halfway through the manuscript. With that in mind, my new goal is to complete the first draft before the new year begins.

I’ve found it easier to write post-NaNoWriMo. During November, part of my attention was focused on tracking my word count to see if I could finally hit the 50,000 goal (better luck next year). I always set out to actually win the competition, but never expect to. Regardless, it has been nice no longer feeling the need to be preoccupied with how lengthy my manuscript has gotten while I’m in the middle of writing it.

I think the word count also weighed on me because of where I felt I was at in the story. On average, a published book clocks in at around 70-80,000 words. I had surpassed the 40,000 word mark, but was in the early stages of part 3 of a 5 part story. While I know from my outline that parts 4 and 5 are the shorter sections of the story, as the plot will have ramped up as it comes to its thrilling climax, because I was tracking my word count throughout, I couldn’t help feeling that I was not only behind where I wanted to be in my writing, but that the pacing also wasn’t to the quality that I expect out of my stories.

The latter may still be something that I need to address in later drafts. That being said, the constant reminder was not helping.

It’s been nice being able to just enjoy the process of writing. It has made me reconsider whether to wait until NaNoWriMo to write my future manuscripts. I do enjoy the writing competition, but I don’t want anything that would serve as a distraction to the books I plan on publishing. I want nothing to take away from the focus of storytelling, because I want to deliver the best experience I can to the reader. I don’t necessarily want to abandon participating in NaNoWriMo, but I may want to limit my involvement to interesting concepts and ideas that I’d like to explore, not future manuscripts that I have plans to publish.

Now that the writing competition is over, and I’ve been able to focus all my attention solely on my writing, I’ve found my writing has returned to its regular pace. I also feel that the quality has improved, although this could be part of a continuing process that’s been evolving throughout the competition. I definitely have gotten a stronger sense of the characters and the tone of the story as I’ve gone along, which is common for me whenever I write a new book. I still have a ways to go, but I feel confident the further I go, especially now that I’ve gone beyond the halfway point of the first draft.

Now it’s all about finishing the initial draft of the manuscript, and crafting it to be the best possible version it can be. That will still take some work, but I feel that I’m on the right track.

Until next time.

Hello everyone.

By the time this is posted, NaNoWriMo will have wrapped up for about two weeks. The delay comes from the way I posted my progress during the competition, with my first post occurring four days into the month to summarize how day one had went, and the next post a week later giving an account for the first full week.

So how did I do?

Well…I missed the goal to write 50,000 words in November. I even cheated and I still fell short.

By “cheated” I mean that I was also including the words for the blog posts that I was writing during November, because they concerned updates on how Between the Maws and Claws was going. I even wrote extra posts, so now I have a small reserve in case I ever need to skip a week writing actual new ones. This is technically not allowable because the words weren’t towards the actual manuscript, but I included them because they were focused on the project I was working on.

And I still fell short by about 5,000 words. So, if anyone was tracking my career record for NaNoWriMo, I am now 0 for 3. I know that it has to do with my pace for writing novels. I don’t like rushing through a first draft, I prefer to take my time to help better understand the tone and voice of the book, as well as the characters. The longer I take to let the writing simmer, the more ideas spring to mind, small details to include, or thinking about how characters will behave to events in the story. Also, a first draft always needs a lot of work, and the more time I take writing the first draft, the more things I typically am able to spot to improve in the later drafts.

This is also the longest manuscript I’ve written for this contest. I knew that going in, but I didn’t know how much that would impact my writing. I really didn’t think NaNoWriMo suited writing this manuscript. For my three published novels, this format for writing works really well, because they were all novella length, cutting right to the point. For this manuscript, I knew I needed to take my time to let the story settle in, laying the foundation so that once everything’s in place, the story really accelerates to the explosive ending. I think I need to keep this in mind for manuscripts going forward, and whether NaNoWriMo will be a good fit for them.

This may all sound negative, but I’m actually pretty happy with where the manuscript is right now. I feel I’m about halfway done with the first draft, with a lot of ideas to improve it through the later drafts. The weight of word counts is now off my shoulder (until I’m done with the first draft and will need to start focusing on edits), and the changes I’ve made to the writing style seem to already be paying off, as I’m noticing I’m having a much easier time writing pages, whittling the time down closer to my norms.

I’ll continue posting updates as I work through the rest of the first draft and beyond. NaNoWriMo may be done, but there’s still such a long way to go.

Until next time.

Hello everyone.

We’re down to the last full week of NaNoWriMo…and what a challenging week! Not only did I have two days where I was planning on really pushing myself to write, I also had to write around Thanksgiving festivities.

I’m not going to lie, at the start of this week, I didn’t know how I was going to reach my writing goal each day. Thankfully, I had a short writing day on Thanksgiving and Friday, two days that I knew I was going to be spending with family. It was the days I was going to be writing 3 and 4 pages, which was scheduled to happen twice during the week, that really had me doubting myself.

On my longer writing days, I changed my strategy for tackling my goals. Normally when I write, I sit down until I’ve written a page, then take a break from it, finding other things to do while I plan out what I want to say in my next page. It takes me on average a half hour to do this, but I always schedule an hour interval when I’m writing, just in case I get stuck on what I want to write (which has happened a lot this project). 

For this week, instead of stopping when I wrote a page, I pushed myself to write for the full hour. This was key to reaching my daily goals. Doing this helped me write a page and a half in the time I had regularly allotted for writing. Once, I even managed to write 2 pages, guaranteeing I was at least halfway toward my goal in just one hour. And because I start each off each day writing, that’s a huge confidence boost to start the morning.

I also implemented a new way of writing the chapters mid-week. I’ve been mentioning all the notes I’ve been making for revisions throughout NaNoWriMo. All these planned revisions pointed to one thing: something wasn’t working about the way I was writing the story. I didn’t feel there was an issue with the story itself, because after each writing session, I kept coming up with more ideas of ways to enhance the story and new details to include, a sign that my passion is driven to tell this story.

Already I feel that this change to the writing style is a huge improvement over the way I was forcing the narrative. I’m glad that I’d noticed something was off immediately, and although I would’ve preferred to pinpoint and address what wasn’t working, it’s encouraging to see that I finally figured out how to write this story. This will just be something to add to the list of things I’m going to need to change when I work on the next draft. I’ll be talking more about what this change was in a later post.

So I’m going to be really busy when the revisions do start.

This NaNoWriMo has been a tough ride. I think this may be the most difficult first draft I’ve ever cobbled together. I like the challenge. 

When I sent the manuscript for I’m Not My Father to my editor, she called to tell me that the chapters that took place in the bar didn’t work for her. The pacing was way off, dragging on far too long. When I was discussing it with her, I agreed with a lot of the points she made, but I also understood that to implement them meant performing a massive overhaul, not just to the chapters that took place in the bar, whittling them down dramatically, but the chapters leading up to it, as now I needed to work in details that needed to be relocated from the bar scenes because they were still relevant to the plot, and do so in a way that they still felt organic to the story.

At first, I wasn’t sure I’d be able to do it. To be honest, even after spending weeks on it before sending it back to my editor, I still wasn’t sure I’d done it. I felt so relieved and exhilarated when she got back to me saying I’d done it. It’d been a huge challenge for me, and I felt like I’d risen to it.

This has definitely been more challenging, but I keep looking at how my mind keeps coming up with solutions each time I spot problems with the manuscript, and believe that I can rise to meet this challenge too. I love that I’m implementing these changes going forward to start improving the manuscript, and I can’t wait to apply these ideas to the next draft.

Until next time.

Hello everyone.

Another week of NaNoWriMo is in the books, and I can confidently say I’ll be busy with revisions after I’m done with this initial draft.

I know it sounds serious, but they’re called rough drafts and sloppy copies for a reason. There’s meant to be a lot more work done before they’re considered completed.

I’ll admit that this is definitely the roughest first draft I’ve ever written. Just this week alone, I’ve considered altering the chapters I’ve written. It’s not the plot I’m having an issue with, I think that’s gotten into its rhythm, particularly when the main antagonist is introduced and they declare their goal. But leading up to that, while I feel I’m conveying information to the reader, I recognize that I want to do it crisper, make it much economical to get through.

The same thing happened on the chapter I just finished today. Again, I like what happens in the plot at this point. My main character is interacting with two key characters who’ll have an impact on his life in the story one right after the other. I even get the chapter to end on an enticing cliffhanger. I just feel it reads too long, and I run the risk that if the reader isn’t as engaged in the story as I’d like, I might lose them forever.

I also had to laugh when I looked down at my notes and saw how many things had failed to make it into the manuscript. I’d specifically focused on stating what the atmosphere should be like for each chapter, and as I re-read the notes, I thought to myself “It’s not like you don’t have ideas, why aren’t you following through on them?” I want to establish this tone so it creeps into the reader’s subconscious, and they experience what the main character is going through as the story progresses. The writing’s going to have to get better if I want to achieve that.

All of this probably comes across really negative, and in a way it is. There is a positive takeaway to all of this. I’m not only recognizing that this draft isn’t working as is, I’m already coming up with solutions to address these shortcomings. For the latest chapter, since both interactions are really important, I’m planning on splitting it up into two separate chapters. This way, not only does each character become the focus on their own chapter, neither chapter reads that long, keeping the more clipped pace that I’m after.

For the atmosphere dilemma, this is going to be my focus while I’m writing the next draft. By that point, I’ll have the framework for the story on the page. With the first draft of the manuscript as the blueprint for how the book will read, it’ll be much easier to infuse this atmosphere over what’s already been written, rather than going back while I’m in the middle of writing it and trying to fix it now.

I already expect this will take at least one extra draft during the writing process, but that’s okay. The important thing is assessing what’s working and what isn’t so that by the time I’m looking to publish, it’ll be as good as it can be. That’s always my end goal for my books.

Until next time.

Hello everyone!

Another week of NaNoWriMo is already in the books. We’re already nearly halfway through the month.

I was really pleased with the way the writing went this week. I had mentioned when I was recapping week one that it was taking me a little bit to get going, which is normal for me, but that it was starting to pick up now that I had introduced the main antagonist.

And boy, did it.

I finished three chapters this week, just like in week one, but I really feel the quality of these chapters are a dramatic improvement over the first three. When I was in chapter four, that’s when I was starting to get the sense that while the book was starting off slow, building the world and the main character, now it was really starting to take off.

I loved writing the scenes that the villain was in. The chapters didn’t become perfect when I started writing him, and that’s good because I hope I can improve and enhance them even more during revisions. But I really felt like I captured him on the page, and that the reader will feel the threat he poses.

I do have a concern about the pace of the three chapters it takes to get to this point. They serve their purpose. Jumping right into the confrontation between the two characters, while not jarring, wouldn’t express the stakes to the reader like they would once you get to know the main character. While I think the reader will be rewarded for sticking through the first chapters (as they’re currently written) I know I risk losing a portion of the audience if I don’t make changes to them.

I feel the next chapters are more than worth it, and once the antagonist and their goal are introduced, the tension doesn’t let up for chapters, even when the villain is no longer present. I’d love it if the reader kept turning pages, both to see what happens next, and also because they’re desperately searching a safe point in the narrative to catch their breath.

The time it was taking me to complete pages has shrunk back down to my average. The first week had lots of writing sessions where I was averaging between 45 minutes to an hour just to type up a page. Now that I’m getting to the good stuff, I was flying through a lot of these pages, writing them in a half hour. I don’t think I wrote any in under thirty minutes, or any that took me just above twenty, but that’s okay. That’s pretty rare for me, and tends to happen only when I’m in a really great scene or toward the end of a manuscript.

Although I’m not quite at the halfway point of the competition, I can tell already that I won’t be finishing the manuscript before the 30th. I’m still only on part one. That’s okay. I knew this was going to be longer than any of the novels I’ve published. There’s a lot to unpack in this story, and I want to make sure I get it all on the page.

There still is the goal of reaching 50,000 words by the end of the month. Currently I’m lagging behind slightly, but it’s by no means out of reach. I’m never that concerned if I don’t hit the word count goal, which is good, because I never have. My focus is on getting the first draft done, and NaNoWriMo gives me that motivation with the distraction of this writing goal. I am inclined to pick up the pace, as I’d like to actually hit this total one of these years.As we get closer to the deadline, I might start pushing myself to write more each day to try to hit that benchmark.

Until next week.