This is that time of the year again, when thousands of people around the world will put their pens to the paper and attempt to create a novel, or at least put 50k words on paper that they will wrestle into a good story in consecutive drafts.
I will be joining the festivities as well, but I will be doing something different this year – I will be a NaNo Rebel. Instead of trying to write a new story from scratch this November, I will be putting final edits on my very first novel – Of Broken Things.
This story and I have gone through several iterations over the years, slowly going from the first disjointed draft I did during NaNoWriMo 2014 or maybe 2013? To something that is almost publishable. And since it is almost publishable, I had decided to spend some money and order a developmental edit for the draft. And even though it was costly, I don’t regret it.
First, the feedback I received told me that the story is worth telling. It’s interesting and will find its audience.
Secondly, I received a couple suggestions on how to tighten the plot and make some of my protagonist’s choices more impactful.
It doesn’t seem like much, when you read the recommendations, but it requires a careful rewrite of several scenes, introduction of a few characters earlier in the story, shifting the emphasis on a few events, and all in all, a lot of small changes throughout the book. So when you look at it overall, it will be a quite extensive edit that will require me to read through the draft (again), and touch up about 70% of the scenes, especially in Aiden’s story. Damon fares much butter, but I still need to add more background for Cassie and a little more details on the other Nest Subjects.
So I think this would be the perfect project for this year’s NaNo. The draft is a little over 110k words, and I will need to review and correct/rewrite about 70% of the scenes, so I think I will reach 50k new words without problems.
This will be my second year being a NaNo Rebel, and with the same story to boot. Last year, I had to retype my corrected first draft from scratch because my digital file got lost in the void and all I had was a printed copy with all my hand-written corrections on it. So the end product was actually a third draft, because not only did I incorporate the changes already made on paper, but I also added more changes as things progressed.
This year, this will be the final draft (hopefully), at least content-wise. I will still need to do some copy editing to get rid of most punctuation and spelling errors and check it for continuity, but the bulk of the changes should be done after this NaNo. Which means I will probably have this ready for publication next year! That’s exciting and terrifying, and a story for a future blog post.
As of right now, my virtual editing scissors are ready, creating juices are flowing. Let’s get it done!
Happy NaNoWriMo to everyone!