It's A Celebration

This year, as I'm sure you've all noticed by now, I have a lot of goals.  I want to prove to myself that I can be a prolific writer.  That I have the capability of producing four complete (and well written) novels in one year. Of course, I am hoping that one day I'll be able to support myself with my writing (despite being advised to keep the steady job.  If I'm making enough money on my books, unsteady as that money may be, I don't think I could stomach working the day job) right now I've got a full time job that takes a significant chunk of my writing time.

So January first I started editing the first of four books that I'm hoping to get to the second draft (at least) before the end of the year.

Stolen Magick.  One of the four novels I wrote during Nano.  The first one, in fact, and the one I liked the most, despite all the headaches it gave me.  I had two characters show up that I wasn't planning on.  One character that didn't step up, even though I had made a character bible for her, a love interest that wasn't supposed to be there and more subplots than I could have ever planned out.

The way I judge how well a book goes is by how much happens that wasn't planned.  So I did pretty well.

Anyway, the goal was to have it done by the end of January.  But I've never been very good at keeping my goals.  I find them too arbitrary.  They aren't deadlines, they're just dates I pulled off the calender and decided was the day I was going to have it by done.  There's nothing holding me to that except myself, and I'm not very good at holding myself accountable.

So, when in a day of uninterrupted wordmongering I realized that I had actually finished the book and BEFORE SCHEDULE, my first thought was 'what?'

Yep.  I didn't believe it.  Even though I print off my books and there was literally no more pages to turn.   Even though I had just read the ending that I had written.  Even though I had been on track with my goal all month.  Despite all of that, I still didn't believe that I was done the book.

But I was.  Only to a second draft, don't get too excited.  And I'm already thinking that I need to play with the structure before anyone sees it.  None of that matters though, because the biggest thing here is that I accomplished my goal!

I have huge goals this month, and it's going to be key to finish the small ones in time.  So it's awesome that I'm not falling behind already.  2013 is turning out to be great so far.

Now to celebrate.  What should I do?  Here are the options:

1) Start rewriting Dangerous Waters (and epic fantasy that's far too short)
2) Start rewriting The Commons (A YA that I love, but it was just all wrong)
3) Start rewriting The Descendants (My first ever book, and a YA), or
4) Watch TV shows until February.

What do you guys think?  Post below!!

Goodbye, Stolen Magick (Day 7)

So, today I finished the first of the four novels I will be writing this month. (Okay, so right now as I'm writing this post, it's not finished. It's still hovering around 66k, and it's should be ending at about 70k, but by the time this is posted it will be done. Promise!

Anyway, as I was saying, Stolen Magick will be done by the end of the day, and I will be moving on to the second book in my pile.

But before I move on, I can't help but take a minute to talk about the book that I'm finishing.

As you all know (or, at least those that read my blog yesterday) this book didn't go as smoothly as I was hoping. Characters, plot lines and love interests inserted themselves in to what I already had planned out, and I found myself doing the one thing I hate doing while writing first drafts: Figuring out where the plot was going.

While I still followed the basic plot that I had figured out before I even started the book, there was so much added to it, I'm not sure it's recognizable as the book it started out as.

Looking back over the past week, though, I'm glad that those characters, plots and love interests showed up. This book is so much better than it started out, and as an added bonus, there isn't nearly as much word padding because of how much I added in.

Somehow, though, I still ended up with about 10k less words. Still not sure how I managed that, but I live with it. 70K is decent for a YA, though I'm going to look at it during editing and see if I can't add a few more words (or maybe even plot points) in there to get that word count up a bit more.

Stolen Magick was a great book for me to start with, and while I'm looking forward to writing the other three books that are still waiting for my attention, I can't help but be a little bit sad to be finishing this novel.

All good books must end somewhere, though. And I'm assuming that goes for not so great books too, so I have to say good bye to Stolen Magick.

Next up: Aliens Stole My Socks!

How is your nano going? Have you ever finished a project and been a little sad to see it go?

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Daily Word Count: 4,786

Total Word Count; 70,878