Camp NaNoWriMo Debrief
Hi everyone! This past week I finished up April's Camp NaNoWriMo. For those of you unfamiliar with this program it is a community where everyone involved is trying to meet a word count goal through writing daily. I just hit my goal, finishing half-asleep with nothing left in the tank except raw determination, and at the bitter end, I was coming up short on that as well.
So where do we stand now? Well, I started the month with a word count of 48,600, and as it stands right now, I am at 72,522. While this may not seem like a tremendous amount of growth, I worked myself through some plot holes, finished one storyline, outlined and almost finished another storyline, and now all that remains is to work in the overarching conflict that ties it all together. After that, I'll let it sit and marinate before coming back to clean it all up and send it off to the editor. It's funny that this time around sending my work off to an editor is a lot less daunting. I guess much like anything else, writing and publishing gets a little easier every time.
So I get to finish it now right? Well, not quite yet. I'm hitting pause on this project and shifting gears to work on rewriting the first book, The Secret About Time. With only nine thousand words to go on the sequel, I'll swing back around later, but for now, I've avoided editing the first book for as long as I can stand. The new schedule? I will rewrite one chapter at a time, accepting track changes, and layering in details and conflict as needed. Frankly, I'm getting a little tired of this first story, and while it would be easy to move on to bright and sparkly future projects, I can't and will continue to make it as perfect as possible before I send it out into the world for judgment. Of course, it's hard to know when something is as perfect as possible.
I remember one of the first people I met at the Virginia Romance Writers told me that her friend had been working on the same book for years and years. To paraphrase, my new friend said, "At some point you gotta send it to an editor, publish, and move on." It's possible to overthink a decision and succumb to analysis paralysis, where when presented with so many options, the person stops moving forward out of the inability to make a choice. It's easy to get stuck between revising until as perfect as possible and obsessing over what-ifs. At some point, you just have to do your best and move forward.
Once I finish this round of edits, I'll send my shiny book off to a proofreader for a final round of edits, and after a few buffs and polishes, I'll be ready to unveil my little project to the masses. Did I mention my cover art is in progress? It's getting real around here...
Onward!
Kathryn
