It snowed last night. It snowed on Halloween. I feel like fall has been about two weeks long, which is a crime. Between a late heat wave and an early snow, fall has been all but gobbled up. This is a massive departure from last year for me where I went up to New York for the beginning of fall and came back to PA for the latter portion. It extended my fall and was quite pleasant, and included getting to watch the leaves turn twice. However, this year I could not be so lucky.
It is also NANO WRIMO season. I will not be participating in the traditional sense, though I would have liked to. However, I will be working hard and jumping in on many of the writing sprints available during the month of November.
Progress
In my last update, I said that one of my goals was to finish Anu’s Pov, but that that was fairly unlikely to happen. Well, interestingly enough I was right and also wrong. I started Anu’s POV at 20/100 pages this month and ended at 111/120. So, while I didn’t finish the POV I have exceeded my expectations in terms of pages revised.
Revision is such an interesting thing because I can write a whole new chapter and feel as though I have done nothing at all. So, I started marking my progress by keeping track of both the total and the net number of pages I did each day. Some days, where I only added pages I netted zero, and on others I would have a total of seven pages but net five. It has helped me to put my progress into perspective and makes the work seem a little bit more manageable I ended up with a total of 91 pages revised with a net of 71.
What I’m Learning
One of the girls in my writing group asked me to be her accountability partner in writing. I accepted and we have met twice now. If you were to look at my month’s weekly statistics, you would notice that the last week and a half of the month had a serious uptick in terms of pages revised and added. This is because accountability, or more accurately my competitive nature alongside accountability, leads to results.
In a way, this update is a way to keep me accountable, but that is only on a monthly scale. Having a check-in every week helps me to keep on track in shorter increments and thus get more done. In the past, I have fallen off the tracks in the middle of the month only to work extremely hard at the end of the month to catch up. This is no doubt a product of my ADHD. That is why external deadlines in smaller increments make sense for me. It helps me to feel the pressure and pressure helps me to get things done. I hope that this will continue to be fruitful.
Leisure
I have spent some time doing art this month but not nearly as much as I would have liked. There just isn’t enough time to do Inktober and stay on track with my revisions, but I work on my art as much as I can in the evenings, however, that time is split with reading and other leisure activities.
My goal moving forward is to read for an hour or two every evening after work, this should give me around half a book to a book a week, depending on the length. I also intend to completely finish a book before moving on to the next one which is something I’ve found difficult ever since I was a child but has gotten worse in recent years. I have started about 30 books and not finished them. So, I have started compiling a TBR list that I will go through one at a time.
Another thing I know I mentioned in last month’s update was going to see Neil Gaimen speak. Unfortunately, he got sick and had to postpone the show. Fortunately, it is in November and I can still go. I will be taking notes during it and may do a special post with some of my notes and thoughts afterward. If not, I will definitely add a bit about it in my November update.
Looking Forward
I’ve made significant strides this month, adding quite a bit to my manuscript and coming within spitting distance of finishing Anu’s POV. This has by far been the best month of revision since starting this massive revision and I’m learning a lot about how to revise well. My plan this week is to finish Anu’s POV. I’ve pretty much hacked off the last four chapters of the POV and am adding three or four new ones that fit all the changes that I’ve made. One of the trickiest things is going to be keeping my manuscript under 150k, which once those three chapters are added back in it will most definitely be above. However, this might be an issue I can solve during my line edit if I can’t cut words elsewhere.
Once I have finished Anu’s POV I will move on to Knox’s which is currently 99 pages long. I hope to cut it down to be shorter as well as add in some chapters and scenes that fit the story more and are more dynamic. My goal is to finish that in November and then jump back into Poe’s POV which I have 123 pages left of and which should be easier to revise now that I’ve finished Anu’s POV and have ironed out some of the more difficult details. Once that is done I’ll have 17 pages at the end to revise and then the draft will be finished and ready to send to my writing group for round two of critiques.
I hope to get through all rounds of revision as quickly and querying as possible and the soonest I could see that happening is February and that would be going full-tilt so we’re probably actually looking at March in terms of starting to query this behemoth. I also have some interesting plans for the six weeks my writing group and beta readers will have my manuscript but I’ll keep those under wraps for the time being.
