Winter is approaching and cold days are finally here! With temperatures dropping and lockdown clutching us, it is better to stay under our roofs. Keep in touch via my monthly email newsletter and follow my 30 day experiment on Instagram. So I’ll be working during writing sprints after my sunrise walks in the hills, at my local Sisters in Crime chapter’s write-ins over lunch, and during other set chunks of time. I love my day job, so I’ve created a flexible schedule so I can have both careers (more details about that on publicist Dana Kaye’s Your Breakout Book podcast, if you’re interested). I’ve never been good with endless free time. I might re-type parts of scenes from the hard copy resting on my desk at my elbow, but with small-but-mighty tweaks that make all the difference.Īm I taking time off to do this? Nope. For me, I can best get into the groove of what my characters are saying and doing if I’m writing from scratch instead of revising. The time spent working on the abandoned drafts was never wasted time. The three previous books I wrote from scratch after tossing early drafts are Artifact, The Accidental Alchemist, and my new Tempest Raj novel that kicks off the Secret Staircase mystery series (□A locked-room mystery □A family curse □And the magic of sliding bookshelves, hidden rooms, and secret gardens…). Why do I think this is the best approach? Because I’ve done it three times before, and each time it was the right decision. But by telling all of you what I’m attempting to accomplish, my hope is that my brain will treat this as the real deadline I want it to be, and that the rewrite will be a book I love even more than the ideas I love from my last draft. I’m in love with the story, but I see now that it started in the wrong place.Ĭan I rewrite the whole book in 30 days without the energy of NaNoWriMo behind me? I’m not sure. I’m taking my earlier ideas, but writing from scratch. But upon reading it through, a better approach is called for. I could simply revise my mess of a draft from 2020. Which is terrific for me.īut what about when I don’t have a solid deadline? I get stuck, which is what I’ve been experiencing for the past two weeks. Now that I’m a published author with ten novels out in the world, I often have deadlines imposed by publishers. It’s how I completed a full rough draft and typed two glorious words: “the end.” ![]() It was an important lesson I needed to learn. Instead, you get your whole story down on the page, to revise and build out later.įor an unpublished writer, NaNoWriMo is a concrete deadline. ![]() Having set out to accomplish such a goal, it’s not realistic to go back and edit your words to make them perfect. Most importantly, you sign up to publicly declare your intentions, and you get all of the pep talks, writing meet-ups, and general buzz of energy that goes along with the challenge. The NaNoWriMo challenge is to write a 50,000-word draft of a novel, from scratch, in November-a month with only 30 days. The only reason I completed a draft of my first novel, Artifact, was because I’d discovered National Novel Writing Month, aka NaNoWriMo, which was relatively new at the time. I’ve learned enough about myself over the years to know this is true. I love the freedom of exploring research and ideas with no end goal in sight, but without an external deadline, I will never complete a project. ![]() I have a love-hate relationship with deadlines.
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