A few things to touch on this time around. November means the beginning of National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) and, just as I do every year, I’m participating once more. In the eight years I’ve been doing NaNoWriMo, I’ve only ever finished one novel I began for it. The others ended up abandoned on my hard drive. All novels aside from Fallen were written outside of NaNoWriMo or finished outside of it. Last year was an interesting one—I began working on a book called The Legacy of Frankenstein only to end up burning out around the 16,000 word mark. But it turned out to be a good thing, because it caused me to go back and look at some abandoned projects, one of which was SoulQuest. And though I didn’t finish it in November, I did complete it a few months later in March (more on a SoulQuest update a little later).
This time around, I’m working on a superhero novel. I actually began this back in April or May but then I put it on the back-burner after about 6,000 words because I needed a recharge after SoulQuest with some short stories. Those ended up piling up and took longer than expected, but now I’ve started back on it. I had cracked 11,000 words right before NaNoWriMo began, but instead of starting over with something new, I’ve decided to just keep working on this. Yeah, I know that’s cheating, but it’s not like there are any prizes involved and it helps me light a fire under my ass to keep going. To balance the scales a bit, I didn’t write at all during this first week of NaNoWriMo, so I’m about where I would have been had I started it on November 1st.
Although that writing holiday wasn’t intentional. I was busy on the 1st and the 2nd-3rd I was in Okinawa for the Japan Writers Conference. Speaking of the JWC, it went really well. A bit hectic on the first day because I landed at noon and then had to get from the airport to the rental car shop and then to Okinawa Christian University where it was being held. But I managed to make it in time. I gave two presentations that weekend, one on New Pulp and another on self-publishing. Both were pretty successful. I got to sell a few books and I also got the opportunity to connect with a lot of very awesome writers. Check out the Japan Writers Conference website to read some more about the authors who presented. Very good group of people and I hope I can go again next year.
So today, I’ve gotten back to writing. Managed 2,037 words today for a total of, as you can see on the little image from Writertopia (click on it to be taken to their site, by the way), 13,031 words. According to NaNoWriMo’s stats, the par for today is 11,666. So I’m doing well so far.