Halfway Done with NaNoWriMo

Today is November 16, so I am officially more than halfway done with my first ever NaNoWriMo! I have written fourteen days out of those sixteen, and I have written a total of 26,975 words so far.

I have not written 1,667 words every day, but on those days when I wrote less or did not write at all, I succeeded in making up during the other days.

So here are some of my thoughts about NaNoWriMo so far:

1. I love the website. I enjoy the pep-talk messages they send me. I like getting to go and update my word count after I write. And I utterly adore that they make a little bar graph of how much I've written on what days compared with the 1,667 words a day I'm aiming for. Graphs do bring out the happy nerd in me. :)

2. I have learned that I can write way more than one scene at a time. I'm used to sitting down and writing out a scene and then having to take a break while I shift my mind from that scene to the next. I have now discovered that I can push through that and keep going with relative ease.

3. 1,667 words a day sounds unbelievably daunting, but it really isn't that bad. Sure, when it's a scene I'm struggling with or one I simply had never planned on having in the story and I have no clear sense of where it's going, it can be a bit of an effort to get the words onto the paper. But on those chapters where I know what's happening and I'm excited about what's happening, 1,667 is easily reached and passed.

4. I owe a great deal of my success staying on top of my NaNoWriMo writing to my friend Abby Schwartz, who is participating with me. Knowing that she's doing it to, us texting each other to find out when the other is writing and then checking up to see if it happened, getting to see where her word count is at on the website, all these things have been incredibly motivational to me. She holds me accountable for the writing I'm doing, and it's really helped a lot for me to persevere on those days when I honestly just want to go to bed.

5. I adore my husband. This is not a NaNoWriMo epiphany. I have an amazing husband and I'm aware of how blessed I am to have him. But my disappearing into my office after the girls go to bed and often times not coming back upstairs until after he's turned in has been a not great aspect of NaNoWriMo. I wish I was able to write earlier in the day, but my extremely pregnant self can't seem to find the energy to do much writing when it can be napping instead. My husband has never complained about this sudden decrease in our time together. I don't care for it, and I'm sure he doesn't either, but he supports my dream of being an author and I love him so much for that. And for a multitude of other reasons as well, but I'm keenly aware of that support this month.

I honestly believe I will be a NaNoWriMo winner this year. I will successfully write 50,000 words this month. And it will either finish my book or get me ridiculously close since I started NaNoWriMo with 46,500 words of my novel written (well, 46,503 to be exact). And the nerd in me also enjoys the subtraction of that 46,503 from my current word count to find out where I am in my NaNoWriMo journey.

I encourage anyone out there who wants to be an author (or already is an author but wants help motivating themselves to write another spectacular book) to participate in NaNoWriMo next year. I am having a blast!

NaNoWriMo

November is National Novel Writing Month. The goal is to write 50,000 words in the month of November, which equals 1,667 words a day. I have heard about it before, but have never thought about participating. Mainly because I have never, in the month of November, been at the start of a book. I have been writing for two Novembers, and both times had already started before NaNoWriMo began.

The same is true this year. As of right now, I have written 46,503 words in my novel. However, I expect the novel to be between 80,000 and 100,000. And I woke up this morning realizing how very close to 50,000 words that is.

I will have a brand new baby at home at the beginning of December. I had the goal of finishing this book, subsequent drafts included, before baby comes. With severe motion sickness being part of my morning sickness, coupled with an amazing amount of exhaustion, I have had months during this pregnancy when I have not sat down to write anything at all.

If I could finish the first draft of this book before my baby comes, that would be spectacular! I know I will still have all the follow-up drafts of the book, the peer reviews, and the eventual querying of agents left to juggle while taking care of a newborn, but I would be a heck of a lot closer!

So, I am going to participate in NaNoWriMo this year. I will subtract whatever my word count is from the total number of words I end each day with, so I can actually see how many words I am successfully writing in November, but I will do it!

Hopefully this will be the push I need to actually find the time and energy to get this done.

Writing, When You Absolutely Don't Feel Like It

There are lots of quotes and images out there saying exactly this. Don't wait until you are in the mood to write. Write anyway.

It is only recently that I have begun to properly understand the importance of this.

I have been writing for two years. Yes, there may be a day, or even a week, here and there when I can't really be bothered to sit down and work on my novel. But that day or week passes, and I'm right back to being in the mood to write. I find writing extremely fulfilling, and even when I hit a point where I struggle to figure out what needs to happen next (and that's usually due to the last bit I've written being wrong and needing to be fixed), I am still typically filled with the desire to write. I may struggle for a few days to figure out where my writing went wrong so I can make it right and continue on my merry way, but it doesn't last for long. The book is always there, in the back of my mind, churning and changing without my having to pay it that much attention.

Yet with this pregnancy, it hasn't been working like that. I don't know if it's pregnancy brain (I have noticed I am often incapable of thinking about two things at once, so if my mind wanders while I'm having a conversation, I have absolutely no idea what the other person is talking about. Which is not normal for me. And if you've ever sat down and had a conversation with me, you will notice it going off in a dozen directions. Which is what typically happens silently in my head while I listen to someone, only normally, I'm still paying attention to what the other person is saying. That's just not functioning for me right now) or the general exhaustion of sleeping badly while simultaneously growing a person. But, for whatever reason, that constant behind the scenes writing that usually happens throughout the day is just not happening.

So that day or week of not feeling in the mood to write stretches on to weeks and months. Maybe I sit down to write once a week, but it's not the usual, proper writing. I'm not spending the time, even when I sit down, that I usually do.

This last week, I have been trying to write anyway. To come downstairs with more than half an hour to spare, sit down at my desk, pull up my novel, and write. Regardless of whether I feel like doing it.

And it is hard! It is hard to turn off Netflix or put down the book I'm reading, to devote a solid chunk of time out of my day to write when I'm not really feeling like it.

But it is worth it.

My long-term goal is to sit down and write five days a week, but I acknowledge that right now, with the pregnancy kicking my butt like it is, that's just not doable. So my current goal is to sit down and write, properly write for at least an hour at a time, three days a week.

The first time I sat down without feeling remotely in the mood to write, it was a struggle from start to finish. The words dragged their feet as I sent them out onto the page, and there wasn't that wonderful flow that typically happens when I'm writing.

Last time, however, it clicked. It started out as difficult as ever, but partway through, the flood occurred. It was easy, it was fun, it was what I am used to writing being.

And since then, there are times when I notice the book figuring itself out in my mind. I wrote out an outline about a month ago, and it also seemed forced. But a couple of days ago, the scenes suddenly came to me that made it smoother. That slipped perfectly into my plan for the book and made it work. The only writing I did yesterday was to write down those bits and pieces and add them to the outline so I don't forget them before I reach that point.

I don't know if that churning away in the back of my mind will stop again. I still have six weeks until the baby comes. This may just be a brief reprieve. And who knows how my mind will function with a newborn waking me up at night?

But sitting down and writing, even when you desperately don't want to, is what I need to do. Working on this book is important to me. So, even if I don't feel remotely like sitting down and working on it, I will still force those words out and wait for the floodgates to open once more.

A Change in Perspective

I wrote my novel over the course of a year, edited it, sent it out to agents, realized how to make it a million times better by rewriting over half of it (much, much more than half of it I realize as I'm writing it), and started over.

I wrote about half of the book, realized I was trying to incorporate too much of the first version into the second, and have just this week gotten past the revision of that change and back to the actual writing of the novel.

And I'm noticing a big difference in how I'm writing.

When I wrote the book the first time, I actually started out each day of writing rereading the previous chapters and editing before continuing on. I did that until I had written enough that it simply wasn't feasible, and gave that up. But I did worry about each chapter. As I wrote, I would reread each paragraph and swap out words, rephrase sentences, and just generally try to polish it up as I was writing it. Which makes sense from my writing experiences before that. I am someone who never actually did the three drafts of my school essays, because they were only, what, five pages long or so, and I could easily write it polished and save myself some time.

Writing books is not like that. And that first version of this story was written with that point of view.

This time around, it isn't.

The last chapter I finished, I know is going to need a lot of polishing. I feel like there may have been too much description and not enough dialogue. I know there were times when I used the same word too many times too close together. I feel like I had the main character rushing around seeing too many people in the last few paragraphs.

And I am not going to give it a second thought. Not while I'm writing my first draft.

Because books change as you write them. Stories have a life of their own, and you can be writing away and then look back in surprise at what the characters just did because that is not what you had planned on them doing. But of course, it is what they should have done, so you shrug and move on.

There is a lot of revision that goes into writing a novel. Like, an unbelievable amount. You finish your first draft and have a merry celebration, and then you have to buckle down and make it perfect. And perfect is a whole lot of work.

With my first version, I had my second draft, which consisted of my going through the first one and changing all the parts that had wandered off on their own later on and made earlier passage nonsensical. I had made a list of chapters as I wrote, with a brief description of each one, which I later returned to to make sure that this person picked up this apparently inconsequential item, or this building was described in a way that would make the changes in chapter thirty make sense. And there were a lot of those.

My third draft was me going through and just reading the second draft and checking things like grammar and flow and seeing how it felt to read through it, bit by bit.

My fourth draft was me actually setting aside an entire day to spend eight hours reading the thing through from start to finish, finding inconsistencies and fixing them.

Then I handed the book off to kind and loving people to read through and give me their feedback. Which I only got on probably less than a third of the book if at all, but still, feedback is feedback (I have a couple of different people lined up for feedback this time around, so hopefully they'll manage to complete this version so I can know what the entire book is like).

Then I revised again based on their feedback. I can't remember if I revised twice after hearing from them or if it was just the one time, but I certainly had five or six drafts by the time I felt it was good enough to try to get published.

So this time around, I understand that it really doesn't matter if chapter twenty-three needs a lot of polishing. Because each and every chapter will undergo so many drafts before it is actually a completed, polished work. A few relatively minor issues in one chapter is nothing.

The important thing is to keep at it and complete the first draft, so I can move on to the next ones.

Settling into the New School Year

My eldest started first grade yesterday, and therefore, we are all getting up much earlier than we did over the summer. During those summer months, I always had a plan of getting up early so I could get a couple of hours of writing in each day, but it very rarely happened. Which I'm okay with, since I had an unbelievably difficult morning sickness this pregnancy and I was very fatigued from growing that baby and, unfortunately, losing so much weight from the frequent vomiting.

I am now in a very pleasant stage of the pregnancy where I'm not throwing up constantly, nor am I incredibly tired all the time. Although, the first two days this week of waking up at six were very, very tiring. But I've passed that now, and I'm feeling myself again, even with being awake so much earlier.

It also means I have much more day at my disposal. I am constantly surprised at what time it is, since surely it must be far later!

That being said, I have not found a nice little niche of time each day to sit down and write. Part of that, I'm sure, is that my family is not into its normal school schedule yet, since my youngest won't start preschool for another week and a half. Part of it is also that I finally have some energy and can actually make a start at making my house less of a disaster area. Yesterday I cleaned and organized one of our bathrooms, shifted things around, and made the necessary space to put in the dresser that will act as a diaper changing station when the baby comes. So it was a good, productive day, but no writing got done.

So today I'm going to sit down and do my writing first, before beginning to tackle the house as a whole. I would really like to get my living room cleaned and sorted, but I also really want to work on my book.

I made a sticker chart the other day, as I do. And I decided that I would see if I could extend it all the way until the week the baby will be born. And I did it. I have fifteen weeks before I become a mother of three, and I have all the workdays between now and then written out, awaiting stickers awarded for sitting my butt down and writing.

I would really like to have my novel finished, edited, peer reviewed, edited again, and agents queried before the baby comes. Because life will get a lot more complicated after the baby arrives. Fifteen weeks does not seem like enough time to do it, but I think it is doable. I just need to make writing a priority and stick to it.

Which will be easier to do when I can have some childfree time. My mind is happiest in the mornings, but I concede that writing while my four year old is at preschool in the afternoons will work best. It will also help when she adjusts to not having her big sister around the whole day. Right now, she's been told that I'm going to go do some writing and she can only be in my office if she's silent. And I have certainly not found that to be the case so far. She's forgotten how to play on her own, since she's had the entire summer of not having to.

Still, right now I am going to go and do some frequently interrupted writing, because it's still better than no writing at all. And hopefully we'll soon settle into a schedule where my writing is a given every day and I don't even have to think about it.

Rejection

I was recently reading an article that showed rejection letters submitted to artists of various kinds (writing, painting, singing, etc) who have since gone on to be very famous and successful. The article talks a lot about how foolish these people were who sent these rejections, and I'm sure, looking back, they may be kicking themselves for not getting to be a part of that success.

As anyone completes their first (or seventh) novel and sends it out in hopes of getting published, there are going to be rejection letters. I have a friend who saw firsthand how seemingly random poems were chosen to be published in a magazine, and she, as a poet, found it disheartening.

I, however, choose to see it as encouraging.

The article from above shows how these people were rejected but didn't give up. They kept on developing their gifts and continued searching for the person who would see their vision of their art, and eventually they found it.

There will always be rejection letters. I have been in many book clubs, and I can read a book and adore it while someone else could barely get through it. Or it can be someone's favorite book, and I truly didn't care for it. The same way that there are drastic tastes in readers, there are drastic tastes in agents and publishers.

I recently found a wonderful author. She has written three different series of mystery novels. I completely adore one of them, and don't care for the second. The mystery in the second was perfectly good, but I didn't care for the dialogue between characters or perhaps didn't care for the characters themselves. I have, only this morning, checked out the first book in her third series, and we'll see how I like that one. But that is drastic differences myself within mystery novels by the same person!

And yes, I assume agents and publishers look beyond their own personal enjoyment and can see the books from a business point of view. Perhaps they have some issues with some of the characters, but can see past that to how well received they can see the general public will find it. I don't know: I'm neither an agent nor a publisher.

But I think the main thing to take away from it is that you don't give up. Perhaps this book of yours gets rejected fifty times over. That doesn't mean that you turn your back on your dream of being a published author.

But it also doesn't mean that you don't look hard at your story. It might be a great idea, but maybe you're writing needs to continue to grow and improve before anyone will be intrigued enough to read it all the way through.

I completed the first version of my novel a little over a year ago. I sent off whatever sections agents asked for, and started to wait. And before a week was up, I suddenly realized how to make my book unbelievably better. It meant throwing out over half the story and starting over, but it was improve the book dramatically.

Which means, that that first version was in need of improvement. It had flaws that I didn't notice until I saw how to fix them.

And I have gotten so many rejection letters from those agents I did query before realizing how to improve. They didn't sting though, since I had already realized these flaws that needed to change.

However, I'm sure that when I do sent it out to be queried whenever this new version is done, I will get rejection letters. And I expect they will hurt a lot more than the ones I've already received, since I will (hopefully) have it polished to the brightest sheen my book can be at.

But you don't need fifty acceptance letters. You just need one. And maybe this novel won't be the one to do it, but you just keep writing until you write the story that finds that perfect person who sees the beauty in it.

Even the most successful novelists get rejected. They just never gave up.

Admitting Defeat

I have been adamant as I've been writing this novel. I will not start editing my manuscript until I have completed the first draft. Will NOT. Nope. Not going to happen. Oh, I'll take copious notes about the changes I need to make, but I will not sit down to make them until I've finished with the story. Stories change and mutate all on their own as you write them, so something I feel needs to be adjusted in chapter fifteen while still only on chapter twenty might need to change in a very different way by the time the story has ended.

"How foolish to start editing when you haven't even finished!" I scoffed.

Except... I need to.

You see, this is my second version of this novel. I spent a year writing the first version, with the copious notes being all I needed to do all the editing at the end. But that version had two points of view, and after completing it and sending out my query letters, I realized how to make it into a novel from a single point of view, which would make the story infinitely better.

Now, in this version, there are glimpses of the other point of view. I have a row of notecards taped up on the wall of my office outlining those glimpses. I found a way to double up the events to make them take up less time in this version. I thought it was good and wonderful.

Then it hit me that it is too much. That other point of view, and her story, are taking up too much room in this version. It's making it a more difficult read, a more garbled storyline. In other words, it's causing the book to be worse, and not good and wonderful as I had hoped.

I need to fix it. I've figured out how: instead of two events throughout a myriad of glimpses, I need to cut it down to three glimpses, one event each.

Which means I need to move away from the story that happened in that first version and make something new. I need to combine events to make newer ones, more refined and smoother.

Which is a great big edit.

"Oh, do it at the end." I thought to myself.

But no. Because stories change and mutate and become something else entirely as you write them. And this is a big part of what is already written that needs to change. Who knows the path the characters will take to reach the end after this edit has escaped onto the paper?

If I don't redo it now, I'll have far more work to do redoing not only this first part, but also everything that follows.

So, I admit defeat. I will begin editing the first part of my book before the end is completed.

And going forth, I will check my superiority at the door. Yes, I have successfully completed a novel before, and while that is a wonderful feat and something I'm deeply proud of, I still have a lot to learn.