Tag: word counts

  • Life Is Laughing at My Intentions

    I love monsters. I love pancakes. I see no reason why we can't move forward with this combination.
    I love monsters. I love pancakes. I see no reason why we can’t move forward with this combination.

    I don’t even know where to start.

    Okay, let’s start with last Friday. I took the day off from NaNo. Ran some errands. Did the laundry. I know. Crazy.

    Saturday, my husband and I went out into the world, claimed a spot at a coffee shop and wrote our fingers to the bone. Go us!

    Sunday, not as much. I wrote some.

    Monday, full of good intentions, I met a few Confabulators for breakfast and then writing. I was about 2300 words behind. Not bad, actually. I could make that up in no time at all.

    We talked a lot, which I needed. I ate pancakes, which I also needed. We wrote some. We talked. And then it happened.

    BOOM!

    Line edits for book four landed in my inbox. I think Sara and Jack probably thought a friend had died or something the way I sat wailing and holding my head in the restaurant. Line edits. And I have a week in which to get them done and sent back to my editor.

    Seriously.

    Originally, I thought I could do both. I should learn to multitask. I really should. And maybe I could multitask–write one book for part of the day, then edit another the rest of the day–if the two books weren’t chronological pieces of the same story. Writing book five while editing book four is too hard for me. I get confused about which events go into which book.

    Last night, depressed over my stagnant word count (I’m now about 8k words behind and the gap is growing), I considered going back to another story I’ve been working on. I had to set it aside for this one. Maybe I could switch over? My brain might multitask better if the stories were completely different.

    I sat and edited for nearly eight hours straight yesterday, and I’m only a third of the way through. The thought of writing more words in the evenings after that makes me want to cry. Also, I think my eyes are bleeding.

    So, no. I’m not writing right now. It’s not likely I’ll win this NaNo. We’ll see what happens. Maybe I’ll do a half NaNo or 40k. That’s still halfway to the end of the book.

    On the bright side, I’ve figured out how to avoid the dreaded NaNo Week Two–ignore it.

    So. Next week. Will I be desperately behind on word count or exhausted from a stubborn need to catch up?

    Who knows?

    Every NaNo is a new adventure.

  • What the Internet Taught Me About Submissions

    I have a weird relationship with sharing work and submissions. I’ve done it; I have my little pile of rejection somewhere in a box and I’m totally okay with it. For one: there’s something funny about how after something is rejected, you start to look at it and go, “Oh yeah, that totally wasn’t ready.”

    But my opinion of the submission process is very much affected by the way I’ve been sharing my writing since I was 17 — the Internet! (Ooooooooooh.) When it comes right down to it, the handful of submissions to small magazines and the single experience with sending a novel query is a minor experience compared to how I handle sharing most of my writing.

    Allow me to make this point with math! (Ahhhhhhhhhh.) Then I’ll tell you what the Internet has taught me about the submission process.
    (more…)