November Novel Madness

November is over! Today is the thirtieth, a month since my last post. It's been an interesting month that has passed extremely quickly.

I did the diligent thing and took part in my first Nanowrimo, and won! Of course, I wrote well over 10,000 words in the last week to play catch-up, but it was done.

But it wasn't as satisfying as writing The Lupine Prince. The difference between the two books? Together with Silver: The Lupine Prince took me 6 months of writing, 88k words. Dangerous Rainbows took 28 days and is 50k words. The difference is 6 times as much time but only 38k words, or 3 weeks of writing at Nanowrimo speeds. So, for the sake of argument, it took about 2.5 times as long to write the real novel.

And then the editing. It took me a few hours to do the spelling and grammar for the Nanowrimo book, specifically because I learned my lesson from TLP, which was to write with spelling and grammar in mind at all times, and knowing exactly what words I most-often wrote wrong. Mainly their/they're and it's/its, of course. The editing for TLP took months of word-by-word painstaking effort. That isn't to say DR doesn't need that, but I don't feel like it warrants the effort.

There is a lot of motivation at play. I like my characters in The Lupine Prince. I like the title. I know how much more I want the series to develop and play out. Bits and pieces of it still trickle in from time to time that I have to write down for future novels. I don't force those ideas to come, I wait for them. I didn't get that with Nanowrimo.

I'm still very much of the opinion that anyone aspiring to be a writer of any kind should sit and write a full-length novel, but I wouldn't endorse the one-month approach. It's not as satisfying.

That said, I think I'll do Nanowrimo next year as well. Because of the pros. Yes, I list cons first.

The thing I did love about Nanowrimo was that I have a better perspective on how much time I can spend writing. I've written in bursts here and there, but nano forced me to do them more often, daily if possible, and for hours at a time on the weekends that I had to use to catch up. I know that I can just turn off the computer in one room, boot up my laptop, and tap away in the corner of the house at any time.

I learned how to devote time.
That alone was worth the month.

(I find it interesting that this post, written without too much thought, has a lot of sentences I'd normally change to something more appropriate if they were in a novel. But I'm not trying to be perfect in a post, this time.)