Just wanted to post a NaNoWriMo update, in case you feared that I had fallen behind -- as of tonight I'm a couple hundred words short of 42,000 and closing in on both the Big 50k as well as the conclusion of The Librarian's Tale. I still can't believe I'm about to have written more in a month than I did in an entire year of working on Confessions (which took three years and is about 150,000 words long)! While the quality of the output isn't quite as good as my former effort, I'm surprised at how well the novel is holding together nevertheless given its preternaturally accelerated growth. And already I'm thinking of how I can get it up to snuff when it comes time to edit the thing...
...after Confessions, of course!
2 comments:
I applaud your tenacity, Tom!
and an editing perspective: you have to *like* the sound of your own voice, but know when you're being too precious...it's a fine line, to say the least :-)
Thanks, Tish!
That's definitely the trick, isn't it? Quite frankly, as I near the end of the NaNoWriMo I find myself getting sick to death of listening to my internal monologue. :)
I have discovered however that it helps immensely to write using a medium that doesn't allow me to see what I've done at a glance, lest I become too self conscious about the whole process and start with the intense bouts of self-loathing that tend to hamstring my ability to keep going.
My PDA is awesome in this regard, as I can only see about the last fifty words that I've written and it's a bear to edit them on the touch-screen with a stylus even if I wanted to. Conversely, I've noticed that my least enjoyable writing sessions occur when I'm working at home on the desktop, where I can see entire chapters at a time mocking me with their obvious craptitude.
Just six thousand more words at this point and I'm calling this thing done, even if I have to kill everyone off to do it...
Post a Comment