Tuesday, November 29, 2011

Update on Goals

Earlier this month I mentioned that I was going to try and finish the current draft of the novel I've been working on for the part few years. Currently I have two more chapters left to write. However, it has become clear that even if I do finish (which is doubtful due to other academic obligations) there is still a lot of work to be done.

This month is NaNoWriMo, or National Novel Writing Month. The goal of NaNoWriMo is to write 50,000 words or more of a novel. As it stands, my work is just below half of this. Clearly, December will involve a lot of editing and trying to find more stuff to put in.

In a way this is good, as it gives me the chance to add subplots and more detailed and expanded back-stories.There were ideas for chapters that I decided against that I can now put back in.

On the other hand, I've had this order of events and chapters planned out for years now. I will probably have to add in new chapters, and expand upon those currently written, but that means reordering events, or creating new events that I never even thought about putting in before. Basically, I have to do what took me three years in much less time.

Ideally I'd have all this work done by the end of my December break. But I think we all know that's not going to happen. I'll be going out with friends, helping out with some volunteer stuff I used to be a part of and procrastinating from working on the book. Those will all take time away from writing.

Maybe, if I really focus I can use the time between my parents going to bed and me going to bed for writing. After all, I don't really do anything then. I just don't go to sleep until really late because that is the obligatory collage student thing to do. Maybe if I use that as writing time I can justify it to my mom. And then I can sleep in.

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