NaNo Update

Now Playing: BARRACUDA by Heart
Just Read: THE PILLARS OF THE EARTH--Loved this. Ken Follett has really catapulted himself to the top of my list of favorite authors, after reading The Century Trilogy and now starting in on the Kingsbridge Trilogy. Such a slow-pace, high-build, well-plotted work.
Reading Now: GONE GIRL by Gillian Flynn

I'm behind.

Not irrevocably so, but pretty behind. By the end of today, in order to be on track to finish 50,000 words in the month of November, I should be at 31,673. I'm at about 21,000. Ten thousand words in one day? That's a challenge. I could probably do it, too, but I doubt I will.

With Thanksgiving this week, traveling to family and enjoying time with them, I expect I'll be pretty far behind still by next weekend. I have eleven days to write about 30,000 more words. That's a lot!

I've got a good plan that extends to about seven chapters right now. I think that if I wrote all the prose in the plan, I would be close to 50K, about halfway through the novel. So there's a great amount of work ahead of me. I really want to hit that 50K mark, but honestly I really am more excited about the story itself. Which is the important part. Still, 50K . . . . So enticing.

Anyway, enough idle writing--back to the story!

A Long-Awaited Sequel?

Now Playing: THE ARRIVAL AT TATOOINE AND THE FLAG PARADE By John Williams

I've probably done more writing-related activity today than I've done in a long time, maybe ever. I was really excited about participating in NaNoWriMo this year. It would be my first since 2013, when I wrote a novel called Star Born. I wanted to use this November to write the sequel.

But first I needed to refresh myself. I wrote Star Born a long time ago, and though I remembered a lot of it and thought about it frequently, I wasn't as up-to-date as I thought I should be when starting its sequel. So I printed out a copy and took a pen to it, editing feverishly over the course of as few days as I could manage. I did it in about two.

But reading it with a pen and a critical eye turned out to be the quick part. It took much longer to go through the word document and type in the changes I made. Plus, I made a bunch of notes about details that needed to be added earlier in the novel, so it took forever going back and forth, adding paragraphs and details here and there, and being as careful as I could not to add something that created a plot hole somewhere else.

But I had the day off today and was determined to finish it. I edited 162 pages today, I'm guessing about 45K words. I'm happy with how it turned out. I think it needs one more read--a polish--before it's ready to be queried. However, I'm definitely ready to write the sequel.

Having spent the first day of NaNoWriMo editing, I'm a bit behind. Fortunately, it runs 24 hours for the whole month. So I'm going to publish this post, open Star Born 2, and start it.

I'll try to post regular updates throughout the month . . . but if Nano 2018 is anything like 2013, I'll see you in December.