I'm not participating in NaNo.
Firstly, I feel that writing 50,000 words in a month is asking for error, I've achieved similar goals, but the quality of my work was lacking. I like to focus on having well crafted writing, so that I can avoid spending hours rewriting and working on something I've already written. I dislike rewriting and editing, so, the less I can do, the better off I'll be.
Second, with the way I'm working now, I can't commit to it, because it just won't happen. I'm focusing on The Darkling Legacy, at the moment. As it holds the most promise as far as publication might be concerned. But, what I'm doing with it doesn't exactly jive with writing 50,000 words. Why? Because I'm Editing.... 6 chapters and roughly 10,000 words of gloriously misstyled writing lies in the pages of my book. Misstyled in that TDL is essentially a speculative/sci-fi work, which calls for a certain tone of writing, which is different from the tone that a romance novel requires, or a fantasy novel. So, first, my tone was, not wrong, but not right, it worked, but not all the time, so I'm updating that.
And my skill level has increased, so I want that to be contiguous through the whole thing so that I have to do less drastic editing later on.
I'm also trying something new, a style of writing that dives into Donovan's head far more than before, creating entirely new passages, and presenting the setting, and him, in an interesting way.
oh, and picking out stupid mistakes.
So, all of that is a fair amount of work to do, and I go slowly (evil, vile, me), I can edit for hours, once I get going, but it's that initial start that hinders me. I'm getting better about it, though, and I've done quite a bit, but I'm working on what will be close to 4000 words of the 10,000, so I have much more to do. It's not conducive to voluminous amounts of writing, because I'm not producing anything new.
When I'm done with it, I will start writing Chapter 7, and the story will start picking up, and we get taken off on an adventure with Donovan and Cory, but it's a long road to get there.
maybe someday I'll do NaNo, but not this year.
Robert W. Nance
