TaNoEdMo
.November is NaNoWriMo. I already have a novel, or at least somewhere between 180,000 and 200,000 words of something that could be a novel if you looked at it funny. Last year I wrote a microversion of it in September. That did spur me to work on it more, but I never managed to find a rhythm that would let me finish it. So, given that the approach of a target every day seems to work for me, I’ve decided that this will be Tadhg Novel Editing Month.
My goal for the month is to have an 80,000 word second draft done by the end of the month. It doesn’t have to be perfect, or great, or even good. It just has to be readable. It can have plot, strucrtural, characterization, dialogue, and stylistic problems aplenty, but it has to be something that would pass muster as a member of the novel form.
80,000 words is 2,666 or so words per day, and that’s my target. Tonight I went through the outline of how the novel should be divided into chapters, and conventently divided it into fifteen of them. each chapter should be about 5,333 words long. That makes the schedule uniform: 2,666 words per day, one 5,333-word chapter every two days, one novel in 30 days.
I’m going to keep posting to my blog with the same schedule, five days out of seven. My posts might be a little shorter and potentially lower-quality while I’m working on the edit, since I’ll need to guard my time jealously. I will also post my word counts every day, probably as separate posts unless I the post is connected to the novel writing.
Really, I should have done this last month, and done a proper NaNoWriMo this month to get a start on the second novel, which isn’t as energetically scratching on the door at this point. I think it might be sulking. There is a NaNoEdMo as well, but I don’t know when it is, and don’t want to let a minor detail like that get in the way of finishing this draft. Hopefully in a couple of months I’ll assign myself a novel writing month and write the first draft of the second novel—I’d prefer not to wait until next November. We’ll see.
I have the first 2,670 words out of the way for this draft. They were pretty easy (comparitively), since I’d already worked on the first chapter quite extensively. The hard parts will come later, but I should manage. Just 77,330 words to go.