The Yearly Debate

I think a decent swath of us who consider ourselves independent authors are having a little debate with ourselves right about now. It’s the time of year when we all consider writing a novel, or more specifically, speed writing a novella.

That’s right, it’s soon to be National Novel Writer’s Month (NaNoWriMo) where a bunch of people around the country take a stab at 50,000 words in 30 days.

November is a busy month for me. Beyond just Thanksgiving, there’s my anniversary and my wife’s birthday in the mix. I’ve tried NaNo a couple of times, and finished it in earnest one year. My NaNo novel still sits on the “to be finished” pile. And there have been other times when I’ve certainly hit the word count, be it working on Dark Matter, or even with my technical writing at work.

NaNo sometimes feels like something only a beginning author would do. Truthfully, I’ve found that, at least for myself, blasting out word count is not the way to good prose. I can easily produce 2500 words a day if I put my mind to it, but lately I’m much more happy to just write 1000 pretty good ones.

My current writing moment is an interesting one. I’m in the middle of promoting a book for publication, preparing the print edition, and potentially writing the sequel. I’ve got several books that have been sitting on the “to be finished” or “to be revised” piles, and I’ve got a half finished serial for this blog I haven’t forgotten about. Certainly adding 50,000 words to one of those areas wouldn’t be a bad thing. But I also don’t want to distract myself too much from the goal of getting Surreality out there (that book is almost across the finish line).

I’ve been contemplating some kind of a reading goal, or a review writing goal. Maybe 1-2 reviews a day (try to knock my NetGalley review percentage into respectable territory), but that seems to be getting a little away from the goals of the month. Ditto for working on fractal book sequel material (another book on the “to be written” pile involving programming and more pictures and research).

I think the best way to think about this month is as a way to kickstart and focus on some aspect of your writing. For a lot of people, that’s rough drafts, revising, plotting or whatever. For me … well, I’m not really sure.

The guy who actually started bugging me about this stuff is my good friend, Brian. And in that spirit, here’s what I’m thinking. Brian, more than just about anyone, has been wanting to read Dark Matter, which needs a complete rewrite before I would even consider it. And considering that it has been a couple of years since I wrote the original draft, I need to reread before I rewrite. So here’s the deal. I am going to try to read all 200,000 words of Dark Matter in a month. And maybe write 10-15K on Surreality 2 (don’t worry, not the actual title). That’s a long way from getting my book into Brian’s hands, but it’s a start.

This is where my commute and a Kindle that can read to me are going to come in handy. I had this bat-crap crazy idea to write Dark Matter with no chapter breaks, with the idea that I’d add them in revision. This first read will be brutal.

How are you using NaNo?