So, earlier this week, I finished the final (for now) V______ R___ edits. The estimable Brady reckons that unless I’ve scattered typos all over the place, the manuscript will soon be ready to try its luck in the market. Typos are always a possibility with yours truly, so I will keep my fingers crossed!
Keyboard incompetence aside, I have now gone through all but one of the daunting list of to-dos that were jeering at me back in August. I am now free to start work on E________! As finishing the outline of E________ was item number one on said to-do list, all I have to do is sit down, crack open my laptop, and start typing. This, coincidentally, puts me pretty much in sync with National Novel Writing Month, which starts (as it does every year) in November. The basic idea of NaNoWriMo, as people insist on calling it, is deceptively, seductively simple: drop everything extraneous in your life and commit to banging out 50,000 words of that novel you were always going to write but have never got around to. Don’t worry about the quality, just get it on the page. You can always edit later.
NaNoWriMo is, by all accounts, an excellent way to get budding authors onto their backsides and typing. After all, once you’ve hammered out your 50,000 words, are you really going to stop? It’s reported that The Night Circus, by Erin Morgenstern, and Cinder, by Marissa Meyer, among others, owe quite a lot to the turbo boost that NaNoWriMo gave their manuscripts.
NaNoWriMo has a ton of resources attached to it. There are inspirational websites and opportunities for writers to get together to bond over their various projects. Here in Pittsburgh, where I am sitting out Covid pending my indefinitely delayed transfer to Edinburgh, the Carnegie Library is having write-ins, with free coffee and stuff, pretty much every Saturday in November. And here I am, perfectly positioned to take part. For a novel like E________, assuming I start writing it next week, NaNoWriMo could rocket me to the 70% line.
But. To hit 50,000 words in 30 days, you have to aim for 2,000 words a day. I know that comes out at 60,000, but you need a safety buffer against life as we know it. As a general rule, though I’m not fanatical about it, I aim to write two-and-a-bit double-spaced pages a day (the “bit” part of that formulation allows me to pretend I’ve written three pages). Two-and-a-bit pages generally comes in at something over 600 words. For me, that’s usually one to two hours of typing. If you assume a SF novel is around 100,000 words, that’s roughly six months to a first draft, allowing plenty of time for editing, pitching, etc. if you are aiming for a book a year.
To do NaNoWriMo “properly” I would have to find about four hours every day for 30 days. Nothing to a full-time writer but, for me, it would be brutal. I’m pretty sure if I tried it I’d become burned out and divorced: not necessarily in that order. I think I’ll just plod along in the slow lane while my NaNoWriMo colleagues blast past me, flames bursting from their exhausts.
I might wander into the library, though. I may not want to take part, but it will be fun to watch.