My laptop is several years old and starts to hack and wheeze when I try to do things like, say, use iTunes. I decided to clean it out; store files on an external hard drive, uninstall programs I haven’t launched in a year or more, etc.
While strolling down forgotten and neglected lane, I stumbled on my first novel. Anyone who has been here a while will recall I wrote it under the working name The Veil. I had started doing edits, reaching almost half way before leaving it to begin work on my NaNoWriMo book, Gloom, in November 2011.
For fun, I loaded the file and started reading the last chapters I edited and pushed ahead a bit into those chapters that had not yet been polished. A funny thought occurred to me, This isn’t too bad.
So while I prep my Camp NaNoWriMo book, Rebus, for June, I have decided to dub July Camp NaNoEMo (National Novel Editing Month).
In the same way that WriMo seeks to have me write a book in one month, I will endeavor to edit a book in one month in July. The Veil was twenty-eight chapters long. I’m currently on chapter 12 in my edits. So that leaves sixteen chapters to edit. Given July is thirty-one days, that’s almost a precise one-chapter-every-two-days ratio.
I would love to get in a routine of every-other-month of writing and editing. I seem to work better with set goals and deadlines. Since Camp NaNoEMo is my own creation, it is only you wonderful people who read my blog/tweet/facebook posts that can keep me honest. I will post my edit point and new word count every-other day.
As a caveat, expect my word count to grow as I edit The Veil. My first beta reader stated that it read too much like a script and needed more fleshing out, so that’s what I’ll be doing.
August will bring another Camp NaNo which will then mean September will be my fall session of EMo (hopefully for the book I will be writing in June). And then October will be a month of writing Gloom and then November, well, I guess I’ll have to double up on writing months, but that’s fine. It’s a roadmap at the very least.
So these are my writing plans. I ask you all to please keep me honest and working through these next couple of months. My goal was to have something published in 2012. If I stay true to the plan I have here, that could happen. Maybe I’ll even have two works see the light of day.
So how about you? Do you need a plan and a group of people to help you stick to it?