NaNoEdMo 2011: Got The Win, The Finish Comes Next

It took me a long session on the next-to-last day of NaNoEdMo, but I managed to win it despite major distractions TV Tropes, the Huffington Post. That's the good news.

What's the bad news? I'm far from finished editing Spanner Book 1. I'm not even halfway into it, and I got a head start! But it's a pretty hefty book. The first draft took three full WriMos to write.

How will I finish the second draft? Well, for Script Frenzy, I've got a two-part strategy. Part one: write a movie script so I can stop at just over 100 pages (the margin of victory) or so. Part two: when I'm done with that, or while I'm writing the script, continue editing the book so that I can get the second draft finished during April. The advantage of this, and the reason I like Script Frenzy, is that scripts are so quick and easy for me to write compared to prose, and I don't feel the pressure to write brilliantly. Also, movie scripts are short compared to even 50,000-word books. Just the first book of Spanner will come out to about at least 200,000 words.

So I've just won my fourth straight EdMo, and my first with a novel other than my troublesome '02 NaNoWriMo novel Bad Company. That was the easy part. The challenge is to finish the second draft of this hefty novel. But since Spanner's been haunting me since 1992 and I have to get it out of my head sooner or later, I'm going to get that second draft finished whether I like it or not.

NaNoEdMo 2011: My Progress So Far

It seems I've been so caught up in either editing Spanner or procrastinating editing this NaNoEdMo that I haven't given myself any time to blog about it. Well, here's my progress report for EdMo 2011 so far.

As I write this, right before I start my final Panic Time weekend session, I've been editing Spanner for 33 hours. There were some days in which I did only one hour, or didn't edit at all. Now I'm editing three hours and more.

The Intro and Chapters 1 through 5 are now complete. My task for tonight: edit Chapters 6 through 10. I've already done some editing on most of those chapters already, so it shouldn't be all that hard to finish them. I'll start editing (and in some cases actually start writing) some of the Interludes (mainly 3 through 7) if I have time.

I'm hoping to finish the entire second draft by the time Script Frenzy begins on April 1. I'm seriously considering adapting the Intro, Chapters 1 and 2, and their corresponding Interludes (1 and 2, but not in that order because Interlude 1 is an "end-of-episode omake") into a TV pilot -- for a series that may be all but unfilmable because of extremely controversial material and all those satires of real-life corporations, politicians, and celebrities.

Once I'm done with the second draft, I'll repost each revised chapter daily starting with the Intro on April 1, including all the new Interludes and, at long last, the final two chapters, which are currently still incomplete. If the revised chapter has the same name in the second draft (I've been changing a few), I'll post a short entry pointing to the revised original post; if it doesn't, I'll post the chapter anew. But I'm making sure you can read the complete second draft. The final draft will be the ebook.

Anyway, back to editing, hopefully five hours...