Made it through another NaNoWriMo! The resulting 50,000 words are particularly rambling and self-indulgent, but I got to spend a month in the heads of some of my favorite characters, did some world-building, and may have turned up a few ideas worth keeping for the long term.
Writing is a weird process. One of the nice things is that the more you do it, the more you can learn to trust your own brain. I am almost certainly going to throw out nearly everything that I wrote last month, but it’s a necessary step, sort of like building a compost heap.
I haven’t been doing a lot of other writing, obviously. Now that NaNo is over, it’s time to get back to Fairy Hills. The current plan is to finish this draft in December–I only have 20,000 words to go. After that, I think I’ll take a few months and finish the second Round Table book. Draft 1 is around 80k, about half of which is decent material (the other half being one step above cat-like typing), but I have a very strong sense of what I want to do with the story, so Draft 2 shouldn’t be too terrible.
I made the mistake today of opening up a shelved project, 2014’s NaNo effort (I didn’t win that year–stalled out at 42k), reminding myself of how much fun that one looks like, so it’s very tempting to move that up the queue. It would be very different from anything I’ve been working on lately. Being in the alternate history vein, it would require a lot of research and world-building work to do it properly, and would probably run quite a bit longer than my usual 100k, so it might end up getting shelved again depending on how life is going at that point. If it does go back on the stack, then next up will be another urban fantasy–much lighter in the research department.
Either way, there’s plenty to keep me busy until next November.
R Jean Stevenson 