It’s that time again! NaNoWriMo – National Novel Writing Month. Some authors believe it’s a waste of time; nothing good can come out of 1,667 words a day for 30 days. Some authors think it’s great: it builds discipline, it’s fun, you’re writing, creating!
If you want to participate in NaNoWriMo, go for it! If you don’t, that’s fine too, just don’t crap on other people’s fun. Also, since we turn back our clocks today, you can have an extra hour to write!
Personally, I have no problem with a first draft written in thirty days. Everyone writes at their own pace, after all, and I have seen authors decry the concept of doing 50,000 words in thirty days and in the next breath claim to average 2,000-3,000 words a day (that’s 60,000-90,000 words in a month, folks… more than enough to “win” NaNoWriMo).
I do have a problem with people writing a first draft in thirty days, calling it “done,” and trying to sell it to an unsuspecting public. Unedited work from independent authors gives all indie authors a bad name.
It’s one reason I shy away from calling my work “self-published.” It’s just not true. I have a publishing company (VFF Publishing) of which I am sole proprietor, and I do publish my own work, but I am hardly the only person who works on it. I hire (that means, I PAY) editors, designers, and artists. Each book I publish has at least three or four other paid contractors working on it behind the scenes and two or three volunteers (mostly Beta Readers). Each book is a team effort. For example, in the course of publishing Scars of the Sundering, Book 1: Malediction, I paid Laura K. Anderson for editing services, Lily Yang for cover art (and a few pieces of incidental art for marketing), Eric Hubbel for cover design, Anna Meyer for cartography, and I tried to pay Axel Löfving for heraldry, but he won’t send me an invoice.
The next book in the series will have a similar list of paid contractors. So, it’s not self-publishing in my mind. It’s certainly not fast. If I had wanted to publish my first draft, Malediction would have been released in September of 2014, rather than July 2015.
I am an independent Author/Publisher, and I participate in NaNoWriMo because I find it useful for focusing my energies on what I need to be writing. Frankly, I don’t want you to see what I produce during that time, because I NEED my editors and Beta Readers in order to make what I write better. It’s not cheap, but the results are worth it.
Of course, with all this rambling, I haven’t talked much about what my NaNoWriMo project is this year. As a working author, with projects I want to sell, I alter NaNoWriMo’s goals to fit my needs. I plan to write 50,000 words, but it won’t be a complete story. It will be the last half of the third novel in the Scars of the Sundering trilogy: Salvation.
I had about half of Salvation written when I had to stop to finish the production of Malediction so I could sell it at Gen Con. There was a lot of family drama around that time (some of which is still ongoing) and changes at my day job, so I never got finish my draft of that book (I didn’t stop writing, though; I had to re-write the opening of Scars of the Sundering: Lament, and I worked on a short story for an anthology that ultimately got canceled, and I wrote a World of Calliome short story for next year’s Gen Con Author’s Avenue anthology). Now that all that is out of the way, I can concentrate on finishing Salvation.
Truth be told, I needed the break. I needed to think about where the story was going and how I was going to end it while staying true to the themes I’d established in Malediction and Lament. I split up my cast of characters in Lament, and while I planned to reunite them by the end of Salvation, I had to figure out a way to do it that wasn’t contrived or forced. In the course of doing so, I came up with a resolution for the series that I think will surprise readers and defy expectations, yet still be satisfying.
So, write NaNoWriMo-ers. Write like the wind and create art! Create it for yourself, because YOU are the only person that matters when it comes to your art.