Ten-Day Forecast

Ten days into NaNoWriMo, and Rhubarb is on the rails, humming along at a safe and steady pace. I’m well ahead of my word count goal. And it takes only six cups of coffee and/or tea per day. I’m happy with this first draft so far. Although, boring as it sounds, I feel a bit like the plodding tortoise.

It’s hard to say that I was the hare during last year’s NaNoWriMo. I did work steadily and I did “win.” However, I was pouring a dream book (as in a book I dreamed, not a book of my dreams—see previous post) out of my consciousness, molding blobs and chunks of my life into a cohesive story. It was extremely personal, often draining, sometimes very emotional. That book consumed me and still haunts me, even though I’ve stopped revising it. (Again, read the previous post.)

This year, I feel more like a creator, a professional novelist, if you will. Since the main characters aren’t me, or people that I have been close to, I feel no compunction about putting them through hell for my amusement. (A light and funny hell, with a flaky crust.) I think about this book constantly, even when I’m not writing, (Epic showers are particularly good places to sort out the next chapter) but I don’t feel tortured by it. I’m having fun, I’m not stressed, and I’m hoping that shows up on the page.

So what do the next 20 days hold? I will reach 50,000 words several days before Thanksgiving (unless an aircraft carrier-sized asteroid hits the Earth) and will have a finished manuscript long before mid-December. I’ll ignore it for a couple of weeks, and then in January, I’ll start revising it. Forty or fifty drafts later. I plan on publishing it via Amazon.

But what about regular publishers and getting it into bookstores? Let’s just say that the wall between self-publishing and legacy publishing is currently in the process of crumbling. My goal is to get some of my work published the standard way, but the new e-publishing trend has created an amazing opportunity for new writers to kick the door open, get noticed, and maybe,just maybe, get paid in the process. (Click the link there, it's hilariously relevant.)