It’s almost November, and for those of us who write, that means the annual National Novel Writing Month is (almost) upon us.
Eek!
My confession: I have participated in NaNoWriMo twice before, and I have lost both times. “Winning” just means (just!) completing 50,000 words in a single long story between November 1 and November 30. That’s only 1666.67 words/day for 30 days. Doable. Exhausting, but manageable. And yet, I’ve never managed.
And this year, I’m not even trying.
Instead, my goal is to begin revisions on the YA novel I finished up this summer. It’s rough. It’s really rough. And November is shaping up to be an extremely busy month. But I’ve been dragging my feet on this massive project for 4 or so months now, and it’s time.
So this weekend I printed it out and I started reading. Donna helped me (above). I have 3 more days to finish skimming through the roughest 70,000 words I’ve ever put together. Then I’ll start cutting and rebuilding. Shaping. A LOT of rewriting. Mostly rewriting in fact.
My goal is to complete the next draft by the end of the month — to get it to a stage where it’s ready for it’s first round of readers. And it’s a pretty lofty goal, but I think I’ll manage. I think.
I think.
Jessi Cole Jackson 