Another NaNoWriMo has come and gone. Some emerged victorious, while others can proudly proclaim that at least we tried. Whether you hit your 50,000 or not, be proud of whatever writing you accomplished in November. 50 words or 50,000, if you wrote, you're a writer.

Now, with the possibility of a fresh draft in hand, some people will be looking forward to editing and publishing. To this, I have a word of caution:

Wait.

I'm not one of those naysayers or Negative Nancys who wants to quash other self-publishers and throw up barrier after barrier to keep the from pushing that "publish" button, but I do want each self-published book to go out as the best version of itself. Not every book has the potential to be a best-seller, but I do want each and every book, and each and every author, to be the best it can be.

And for this reason, a quick read-through of your hastily written NaNo project before uploading it to KDP is not necessarily the best way to go. You're riding that writer's high, flying on your accomplishment, and nothing will bring you crashing down faster than an honest beta reader or professional editor pointing out the parts of your novel badly in need of improvement.

However, for your novel to be the best it can be, beta readers and editors are needed. Even the best rough draft is just that, rough, and deserves more attention from you. So print out some copies to have beta-readers comment on, go through it yourself with a fine-toothed comb to fix anything that you know needs fixing, and if at that point your really set on publishing, I can't recommend enough the importance of hiring an editor.

There are a lot of great places to find editors. Reaching out to your writer friends on social media, or finding out who your favorite bloggers use/used (thEditors for me) is a great first step. A quick google will turn up dozens of good options, as will a trip to a freelancing site like Upwork or Fiverr. You can also head over to my own Editing Services page, where I offer beta reading, content editing, and copy editing services below market rate.

I strongly recommend that, before you hire anyone to edit your novel, you have them edit a sample of it first (1000-2000 words should be enough). If they're unwilling to do this for free, I'd move on to someone else. Paying someone money to do a poor job is a waste of money, and refusing to pay for a service--even a crappy service--can give you a bad name in the writing community. So do your homework, and when you're ready, do what it takes to make sure your book is the best version of itself before you go to publish.

​Today, in honor of the break-neck deadline many of us have imposed upon ourselves for NaNoWriMo, I want to remind everyone that writing a book is a marathon, not a sprint.

Many of us live our life with deadlines, and in the past I've often written about the importance of deadlines, but for anyone who is feeling the crushing grip of anxiety that comes from knowing that--short of divine intervention--you will not be meeting your NaNo (or whatever) goal this month of year, I want to remind you that meeting that deadline--or not--isn't the end of the world.

Self-imposed deadlines are good, and striving to meet them is healthy, but rather than setting them up as the be-all, end-all, let me offer some counter advice, especially when it comes to editing: 

Take. Some. Time.

Take some time between finishing your first draft and jumping into editing. Take some time between finishing that first edit and jumping into the second round.

There are stories out there about books that take 10 or 20 years to write and publish, and although that might be a longer timeframe than many of you are comfortable with, remember that it also isn't necessary to pump out several books a year. Or even one a year.

Once you've finished your rough draft, however long that may take, take some time to let the story settle. Step away for a week or a month, brainstorm new ideas for, or step away from writing altogether and spend your time reading, or painting, or playing Madden 2019 and waiting to see how long you can play before the music drives you crazy.

Take some time to come back refreshed and recharged, instead of burned out on your story.

​Take some time, but not too much.

Set yourself a goal for when to come back. No shorter than two weeks, no longer than two months. Mark it on your calendar, or set a notification on your phone, and on that pre-ordained day, sit back down and get back to work. If you don't start then, it's too easy to walk away from that book for years, letting it languish in a drawer or a dusty corner of your hard drive, filled with potential it will never reach without your attention.

So give yourself two weeks or two months, then get back to work. Take some time to rest, then make some time to edit. Few people enjoy editing as much as they enjoy writing, but it's a necessary process. And when you've edited it as much as you can, if you have aspirations of publishing, hire an editor to take it a step further.

It's Day One of NaNoWriMo 2018, and I'll have to keep this short so I can get back to writing, but I wanted to wish everyone participating this year good luck and remind you all that I will be posting what I write each day on my NaNoWriMo 2018 page. It's the sequel to The Emperor's Daughter, so if you haven't read the first one in the series, head on over to Smashwords and get it for free, or go to Amazon and buy it for 99 cents.

National Novel Writing Month is right around the corner, and this year I will be working on the sequel to The Emperor's Daughter. I'm also going to try something completely different this year...posting what I write every day so that people have the experience to see how the sausage is made, so to speak.

I've noticed during my journey as an editor that a lot of people get so nervous about how "bad" they think their rough draft is that they get discouraged and either stop writing the first draft or never attempt to improve the first draft into something that is publishable (or just finished if publishing isn't their goal).

In the interest of radical transparency, I want to show other writers just how rough a rough draft can be, and hopefully by the end of the year I will be publishing it as a serial that has polished, respectable, readable parts based on what is sure to be a "bad" first draft (It's hard to write a good first draft of 50,000 words in 30 days). Since The Emperor's Daughter was a novel originally written just for enjoyment and offered for free, I believe that showing this process can only help other authors on their journey, although fans of The Emperor's Daughter might want to wait to read the finished product if you're not interested in a wild and unwieldy draft.

​I also plan to post the editing process on my editing website so that people can get an idea of what professional editing should be, with the caveat that editing your own novel is never as good as paying a professional editor to do that work for you, regardless of whether you are good enough at editing to offer professional services to others. 

I probably won't be starting at midnight this year, because that is way past my bedtime, but there's a good chance I'll be starting at 4 in the morning on Thursday, so feel free to join me! Remember, even if you don't "win" NaNoWriMo, everyone who tries is a winner in my mind.

 hSo that scene list continues to work for me, and I've kept up with my writing (almost) daily. I started out with seventeen scenes, which I'd mentioned not being overly enthused with because that would make for a very short novel, but I've already added six more as I wrote, so I think the length will grow organically. Still Snowflake-ish, but not perfect adherence to the method, which is what I'd predicted from the beginning.

I also found a new inspiration to keep me going. If planning my novel out with the Snowflake Method keeps me going by giving me something concrete to work with, stumbling upon the #OctWritingChallenge hashtag on Twitter gave me some external motivation.

National Novel Writing Month is next month, and next week's blog post will be on that, and hopefully by then I will have finally decided whether to have The Talented's sequel or The Emperor's Daughter's sequel for my NaNo project this year. However, my challenge for this month is only 500 words or 1 hour of editing a day.

This Monthly Twitter Writing Challenge has apparently been going on for years, originally geared toward people who couldn't meet NaNoWriMo's goal of 50,000 words in a month because life is just too busy but could commit to a smaller goal of 500 words a day, and so far it has really worked to inspire me to hit a very reachable goal. 500 words a day is just enough that you have to make a point of it, because you won't accidentally stumble into it, but isn't so much that you have to set the rest of your life on hold.

It's also a nice change from NaNo because it's 500 words every day. No making up for missed days. And you get to share it on Twitter, which makes for a fun community experience.

It's also getting me ready for NaNo by getting me writing daily again, a habit which is great to have and which I suffer to form again once I've broken it.

Unfortunately, blog posts don't count for #OctWritingChallenge, so I'm off to working on my novel again. There's a new 500 words/day writing challenge every month, so if you want to write in NaNo but can't manage 50k, check out #NovWritingChallenge on November 1st. 

It does not escape my attention that rather than publishing this on December 1st, or even November 30th, I am publishing this update on December 9th, which isn't ideal. That said, I do have an exciting announcement to make...

I won!

Unfortunately, I did not come anywhere close to meeting my goal of 100k words. I spent a good deal of the month sick, which slowed me down, and then disheartened by getting so far behind, which only made it worse.  However, despite falling WAY behind, I was able to make a comeback in the last week and ended up squeaking by with just 50,349 words. But hey, a win is a win.

​If you want to see just how much of a stretch my win was, here's my stats for the month:

As you can see, I spent most of the month not writing. To fill you in on those long plateaus, I spent a lot of that time taking naps due to intense headaches and watching TV when my head didn't hurt. But while some of those days I was definitely not feeling well enough to write, for much of it the lack of writing boils down to lack of ideas and utter laziness. However, I kicked it into gear on the 26th and put in at least 5k a day from there to reach that final goal of 50k by the end of the month. And while I would have liked to meet my personal goal of 100k last month, in some ways I am glad to have finished the way I did. I really pushed myself in my writing last month and really had to stretch my imagination to keep my story going, which I probably wouldn't have done had I not had that deadline to meet. I'm happy to announce that writing is going better this month, and I think I will be able to finish my rough draft this month, which has long been my goal.

In the end, although this is not the first time I have won NaNoWriMo, I think I learned the most this month about the importance of deadlines and how they can motivate you. I highly recommend participating in NaNoWriMo to anyone who is interested in writing and is looking for a support group, because those message boards are gold. I'm sad that it only happens once a year, but I might look into Camp NaNoWriMo next spring and consider participating in that, or somehow coming up with challenges myself to push my writing throughout the year.

Did anyone else participate in NaNoWriMo this year? Have any stories, tips, or questions? I'd love to hear from you so go ahead and comment below.

Today is Day 5 of NaNoWriMo and I am currently participating in the local write-in here for the first time. I'm possibly breaking rules by blogging instead of working on my novel right now, but I wanted to supply everyone with a quick update.

I am currently sitting at only 11,872 which is ahead of the pace I'll need to hit the 50k goal for NaNo, but behind my personal goal of hitting 100k. The reason I'm behind is because yesterday, my amazing boyfriend surprised me by taking me out to dinner at a Brazilian steak house where I ate way too much food and hardly had time to get in my 1,667 words before falling into a food coma for the rest of the night.

So far today, I've been busy meeting up with my siblings to celebrate my birthday and picking out my birthday presents from my boyfriend. He told me he wanted to buy me some books on the writing craft, because he's supportive like that, and he's also smart enough that he knew better than to try and pick them out himself :P

I obviously haven't read them yet, but I'll share a picture of what I got at the end of the post, then share reviews of them as I get around to reading them.

For now, I really have to start working on my novel and putting this write-in designated time to good use. With luck I'll reach 15k by tomorrow.

I'd love to hear about any other NaNo success stories or what your favorite writing craft novel is.

Ciao.

​

I'm in no position to lecture anyone on what to do or not to do in pursuit of their dreams, but it occurred to me today that we should all take a moment to be grateful for the good things in our life, big or small. Be grateful to participate in something fun like NaNoWriMo. Be grateful for the people in your life who support you. Be grateful for the amazing piece of technology currently at your fingertips that is more advanced than the computers that sent man to the moon. Be grateful that you are capable of imagination and the capacity to form stories in your mind and put them down on paper, or even just envision the words of others as you read the stories they have written.

It's day 3 of NaNoWriMo. I'm approaching 10k words and will hopefully hit it by tonight. But if I don't, if I fall short of that self-imposed goal, I'm still grateful today for all that I have and all that I am able to do. And I encourage you all to be grateful, too.

Another day, another 1,667 words.

Actually, that's not quite accurate. Yesterday I wrote 3,770, so even though I've only written 1,411 words today, I'm already ahead of my Day 3 goal if I was just aiming for the 50k by November 30 goal.

While some of my success so far is coming from having a very helpful idea board hanging on my office wall to remind me of what direction my story is going, and more of it is coming from being able to bounce ideas off of my boyfriend (who usually doesn't say anything but also doesn't make me feel like I'm going crazy talking to myself), I think a lot of my success and inspiration is actually coming from the NaNoWriMo forum pages. There are people on there who have already reached 30, 40, or even 50k words in under 48 hours, and although I think that's crazier than talking to myself, I also think that is very inspiring.

And maybe something George R. R. Martin should consider.

But I digress. This isn't my first attempt at NaNoWriMo, and if I reach my goal of 50k (which I should be able to easily do at this rate) it won't even be my first time winning, but I do think it is the first time I've felt this motivated to finish, and to do a good job while writing.

It's early yet, and I'm not opposed to grabbing on to the traveling shovel of death to help add to the word count (and if you're a NaNoer and don't know what the shovel of death is, you should look into it because I used that during my first "win" and it still appears in The Bodyguard to this day), but so far I'm happy with the writing I've come up with, and pleasantly surprised that it's not the vomit draft I was expecting. 

If anyone else here is participating in NaNoWriMo this year, I would love to hear about it. And if you're still thinking of it, it isn't too late to join! If some people can write 50k words in less than two days, you can do that in less than 30.

Let's hear some cheers for the start of another NaNoWriMo!

*cheering sounds*

As you all probably know, November is National Novel Writing Month, or NaNoWriMo for short. During the month of November, writers have 30 days to write 50k words. That averages out to 1,667 words a day, a large but not undoable amount of words.

There are a lot of great resources out there to help people with their NaNoWriMo goals, but if you're looking for more information I suggested you go to the source at NaNoWriMo.org where you can find resources, forums, and swag to get you through the month.

So far, I've surpassed today's word goal with nearly 2k words written on day one, and plan to keep writing throughout the day. My goal this month is not just to complete NaNoWriMo and take home the title of "winner," but to complete a rough draft of the sequel to The Talented. This will be the fourth time I've scrapped and restarted T2, but I think this one will work because rather than starting over at roughly the same place and proving my insanity by trying the same thing over and over and expecting a different outcome, I have completely changed the plot and setting for the sequel, and although I'm only one scene into the actual writing and have only plotted out the first half of the book, I'm having a better feeling about this than I ever had about the other versions of the sequel.

So best of luck to all the other NaNoWriMos out there, and if you've ever thought of writing a book yourself but are too daunted by the task, I suggest jumping in and seeing where it takes you. Now's the time!