Another Month of Madness

Well, it's February 28, which means I am once again one day away from madness.

This coming month of madness in March is called National Novel Editing Month, or NaNoEdMo, and is the annual, worldwide challenge to perform fifty hours of editing on our manuscripts within the 31 days of March.

I'll be editing A Double Yellow Line, my February novel effort, a book about a burnt-out personal success coach reinvigorated by a new and unlikely client. I think with proper work, this story has the depth and potential to be worth shopping around. The thing I'm most pleased about is that I still really like the story, even after the brutality of writing its 50,563 words in only 21 days. Even today I'm still coming up with ideas for punching up dialogue, improving various scenes, and deepening the complexity of the characters. This is a good sign to me as the author who has to keep working on it, and also gives me hope of finishing as I enter the March madness (a different kind of madness, not basketball).

I must say, however, that the time commitment of the editing challenge in March is greater than my time commitment to the writing challenge in February. It took me only forty-three hours to write A Double Yellow Line...now I have to step up and do fifty hours of editing. Considering, however, that I'll have 31 days to do that, while I wrote it in only 21, there's some cushion in there. Still, being a fast typist, I can write a lot faster than I can edit. So this will be in some ways a bigger challenge. It means a daily commitment of more than an hour and a half, without fail, to complete the challenge. Perhaps I'll get lucky, and find that I complete my editing process in fewer than 50 hours, in which case I can quit early. I may not have officially won the challenge of putting in 50 hours, but I will have won the tangible, meaningful challenge of creating an original piece of fiction that is ready to shop to agents or publishers. At that point, I'll begin working my way through my quota of 100 rejection letters, and be finally on my way to publication as an author!

If I ever get that far...

Because I'll be spending April working on a business idea of mine, and if that doesn't take off right away, I'm scheduled to write a fourth novel in May. So perhaps in June I can pull A Double Yellow Line back off the shelf and steward it through the next set of gates, that of getting it into the hands of a good agent.

Well, that's the news from here. Wish me luck as I dive into March. It's going to be another wild ride. I'll keep posting here about the adventures and misadventures of being a writer, so stay tuned for more.

Thanks for reading.

Write on!