I mentioned in an eariler post how I’m back on track in regards to working on my latest novel (working title: “Night of the Lonely Werewolf”). I started this novel as part of National Novel Writing Month ’08 and I did great all through November (hit the 50k word goal in 24 days).
Well, like the Magic of Eyri before it (NaNoWrimo ’05), it took some time for me to work on it after Novel Writing Month. Problems included the holidays, travel, starting freelance writing, starting the Magic of Eyri podcast and other things in my personal life.
Having finally turned a corner, I’m back on track. I’ve been working the novel every day this week, even if only for twenty minutes or so at a time. At least I’m writing every day. I’m at just under 62,000 words and my goal is 80,000 for the first draft (a fry cry from Magic of Eyri’s 170,000+ words).
The problem with getting back into writing a genre novel (fantasy-horror-detective-steampunk, in my case) after being away from it for so many months is that I kind of forgot some of my ‘rules’ and what my characters were doing the last time I spent time with them.
Being a firm believer in “The First Draft Can Be Crap” philosophy, I tried not worry about that problem and just kept going. Still, it can be challenging–especially when you’re dealing with things like werewolves, magic and pseudo-steampunk technology. If I were just writing memoirs about high school or something, this would be considerably easier.
While kind of breaking one of my first draft rules (don’t read/edit what I wrote), I’ve gone to the beginning of the manuscript and started reading so I can remember what I was doing back in November/December.
I think it’s a good sign that I found quite a bit of it amusing (which is also what I’m going for, I like writing ‘humor’ into my stories). It also helps that I kept notes during the original writing/world building process. Those come in handy.
This draft is far from perfect, but I want a first draft done by Summer’s end (September). After that, start work on the always important second-draft.
I’m just happy to have my inspiration/writing drive back again. The last six months were kind of scary.
