atlantalarry

National Novel Writing Month begins

It's the afternoon of November 1st, and I'm on the verge of falling asleep as I type.  Today is the first day of National Novel Writing Month, and I've hammered out my first 2,000 words (2037 to be exact) of what will be a first draft with a minimum of 50,000 words by the last day of the month. I wrote about this in a previous post.

Last night, Halloween, I decided to hit the ground running on the project, and after I'd finished distributing candy to costumed children, I stayed up until midnight so that in the first seconds of November 1st I could begin writing  the first chapter of the novel.  I worked from midnight until 1:20, slept for a few hours, then spent another hour writing.  My plan is to work on the novel for a minimum of 3 hours per day, which should put me on track to reach 50,000 words early.

Of course in thirty days I'm not creating great literature.  This is the first draft of a formulaic science fiction novel.  After thirty days I'll begin editing and rewriting.  I expect to have a publishable novel within about three months.

But now, I think I'm going to take a quick nap.

 

An update on my novel

The month of November is going to be busy for me.  As I stated in an earlier post, I'm participating in National Novel Writing Month, an event whereby people from around the globe make an attempt to write a novel with a minimum of 50,000 words in 30 days.

The rules are minimal.  You commence writing on November 1st, and feed your novel into a word-count tool at the end of the month to determine whether you were successful.   The emphasis is on completing a rough draft within the time limit, not on creating a polished, edited, finished novel.

Advance preparation of an outline, research, and character sketches are allowed, so that's how I'm occupying my time prior to the November 1st starting date.  My own approach is to use my chapter outline to determine where I start writing on any given day.  If I'm stuck on one chapter, I'll start on another and come back to my sticking point later.

After the contest is over I'll spend another two months editing and polishing, so my actual time spent on getting the novel ready for publication will be three months.

It is a science fiction murder mystery.  It will be set on an artificial planet on the edge of the asteroid belt.  It's somewhat formulaic (drawing from common features of both sci-fi and mystery), but then again anything I hammer out in 30 days, and 50,000 words, would have to have a tightly  limited number of subplots and a simple main narrative.

As part of my research I've been reading two books.

The first is The Writer's Guide to Creating a Science Fiction Universe by George Ochoa and Jeffrey Osier.  The book is a guide to avoiding bad science in constructing the setting and technology for sci-fi stories and novels.  Written science fiction is speculative, so skirting the edges of plausibility is allowable to some extent.  But I'm going to try to keep the details of the story as believable and scientifically realistic as possible.

The second book I've been reading is Writing Mysteries, edited by Sue Grafton. It's a series of article on the craft of mystery writing, by Sara Paretsky, Tony Hillerman, and a number of other writers.

My plan is to work on the research, outline, and character sketches up to October 31st, then hit the ground running with the novel itself starting on the first day of November.

A 50,000 word novel in a month

Since I'm a person of many interests, cursed with a somewhat short attention span, deadlines are good for me.  Publicly announcing my deadline on a particular project is even better, since it creates accountablility, even if embarrassment is the only consequence.

After considering several post-retirement careers,  I've settled on writing.  It's something I've always enjoyed, and it doesn't take a lot of motivation for me to sit at the keyboard and write.  Doing it in a focused and disciplined manner has been my main challenge.  I've been submitting short stories to publications regularly over the past few months, have been ruminating on several ideas for novels, and have even written a few chapters of two of those novels.

But I needed something to jolt me into creating a complete first draft of a novel.  I found an event that fits the bill.

David Seah wrote a post on his  blog entitled National Novel Writing Month 2012.  It described a yearly international event whereby aspiring writers encourage  and pressure fellow participants to write the rough draft of a 50,000 word novel in the month of November.  Since November is fast approaching, and I've made a committment to myself to write daily anyhow, I decided to take the plunge, and officially enter the event.

If you are an aspiring novelist, and need something to focus your effort, and create a structured deadline for yourself, this may be the event for you.  The official site is  http://www.nanowrimo.org.

So stop fantasizing about that novel, and start writing.  I intend to do short progess reports on my own effort through the month of November.

Getting serious about submitting my writing

The body of this article is a post I made on the Writer's Digest community blog.  I've been writing for a long time, but it's just been over the past month that I've decided to get serious about it.  The post below is about my current approach to getting my tools together.

Judging by various articles on writing I've read, some writers have a problem motivating themselves to actually write, and finish their work.  That isn't exactly my problem.  I can sit at the keyboard in the morning and come up with dozens of ideas for stories.  I can also allocate time to hammer out and polish an article or short story from any of those ideas.

My problem has always been submitting, and then tracking those submissions.

A few weeks ago I decided to sit down and devise a system of submission and tracking for short stories. 

First I worked up a list of publications along with their submission guidelines.  If they accepted electronic submissions I bookmarked their submission page in my browser, if they only accepted submissions by mail I added their address and editor's name to a running list.

I created a spreadsheet organized by story.  Alongside the title of the story I included date of completion,  a list of prospective publications based on the nature of the story, a corresponding list of submission dates (to track where the story actually was at any point in the submission-rejection-or-acceptance cycle, and the status of the story (in development, submitted, accepted).

What this allows me to do, when a rejection comes, is simply mark the article rejected by the periodical's name on the spreadsheet, submit it to the next publication on the list, and mark the date of submission next to that publication.

That takes care of tracking the actual submissions. 

Another problem I had was losing control of the version of the story.  I'd do rewrites to a story, come back to it a few weeks or months later, and discover that I had two or three versions of the same story.  This was aggravated by the fact that sometimes I'd do edits at my desk computer, sometimes my laptop, and I was saving my work, inconsistently, onto a thumb drive.

I solved this by setting some policies.  I created a folder entitled "Writing".  The sub-folders within Writing are for each story, and contain any files associated with that story (outline, notes, the story itself).  I save my work frequently as I edit, and several times per day I save the whole Writing folder and its sub-folders to my thumb drive.  I haven't used my laptop to do edits since I set these policies a few weeks ago, but my plan is to carry the thumb drive with me, and carefully transfer edited stories between the laptop and the desktop using the thumb drive.  In the past I've tried Google Docs for editing, but I often edit where I have no network connectivity, and don't want to be dependent on the web.

One other thing I've done is set up templates in my word processing software for the formats of each of publications on my list.  I use Open Office, but every modern word processing software package I'm aware of has templates of some sort.  This way, when I start a story, my name, page numbers, and contact info are inserted automatically, along with the settings for font and spacing.  All I have to do is open a template for the first publication I plan to submit to, provide a title, and start typing.

One other thing I do is have envelopes ready, including a few envelopes addressed to me for SASE, so that if I'm submitting to a publication which doesn't accept electronic submissions, getting them a hard copy is quick and easy.  It minimizes the impulse to procrastinate.

As a result of these changes to my habits and system, I've submitted three short stories (which were already written before I made these changes) within the past week,  and I have another story nearly ready for submission.

Over the next few weeks I'll be working up a similar system for non-fiction queries.  I'll post a description here when I get it worked out.