Thursday, March 31, 2011

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.

1 comment:

  1. Congrats on winning EdMo!! I won too, but forgot to log my last hours. So I would have had more. As it stands I have 51 hours or something :P

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