… will just keep coming? I hope so anyway. I came down with a cold suddenly this weekend, but I still managed to write 2k both Saturday and Sunday. In fact, I found myself at the end of my NaNo story on Sunday, with ~35k as my total word count. I had suspected that might happen for the better part of the week, and it was both satisfying and annoying when it finally did. Satisfying because… hey, who doesn’t finding the end of a story? And annoying because 35k is actually way too short. I spent a bit of time thinking about why it ended up being so short and came to a few conclusions. First of all, sloppiness was behind part of it. As I wrote, I had several “oh yeah, I was supposed to include that a few k ago, oops!” moments, so I obviously was not paying as much attention as I should have. But a reason that might be even bigger than that one is that for the last 2 years, all the drafting (and editing, really) I’ve done has been for novellas in the 20k-30k span or for longer projects that require relatively little world building. I think this influenced my drafting of my NaNo project (which is called Etherborn – The Witch’s Pouch, by the way), because I feel like I was just going “scene, scene, scene, scene, scene, done!”. That’s not bad per se, but it doesn’t leave a lot of room for the world building that fantasy stories that aren’t set on Earth (or are set in a radically different version of Earth) normally need or for the foreshadowing and buildup that books that are part of a series usually need (which The Witch’s Pouch is). In short, it needs to be longer, not just so that I can hit 50k for NaNo but so that it can become as fleshed-out as it needs to be in order for me to build a few sequels on top of it (and the rather squished together mess it currently is wouldn’t make a good foundation). So now I’m kinda-sorta rewriting, but not quite. I’m going over the story from the start, adding scenes I accidentally sped past (or thought of too late) during the first draft and expanding scenes that are already there. This naturally involves a bit of editing/rewriting in order to merge new bits and old bits together. I doubt I’ll be able to keep up my 2k per day doing this, but if I manage 1k per day that’ll be enough. So this coming week, I plan to:
- Write ~1k per day for NaNo
- Do some more exercises from One Year…
- Keep working on my cover, and finally write a proper synopsis of Going Home
- Actually upload some new stuff on Wattpad
Which reminds me that I haven’t told you what else I’ve done this week yet! Hint: I didn’t upload anything on Wattpad. But I did:
- Keep up my 2k per day for NaNo
- Do some more exercises, which involves editing a short story
- Work on the cover (by picking out some potential fonts for the title and my name) and email a few book bloggers to ask if they’re interested in reviewing Going Home.
I was planing to email a whole lot of book bloggers but I realized that many of them want a cover with the request (which I sort of knew) and even among the ones who don’t want a cover, many want a proper synopsis (which I did not know). So that’s why I have synopsis on my to-do list for next week. It’s about time I get to that, but I find those so hard!
Oh and, if you’re, y’know, a book blogger and you wanna read Going Home and review it… hit me up!