Five novels, two memoirs and other writerly stuff

Just one of my NaNoWriMo winning certificates. I plan to be a part of the group again this November - something I look forward to almost as much as my birthday.




Have you ever found yourself in the middle of a big project and wondered how in the blazes you got yourself into it? I’m in one of those now and for the life of me I don’t recall how it all began.

In November of 2005 (I think) I wrote a novel of sorts for National Novel Writing Month (NaNo for short). Could be I started a year or so before and just never quite got to the 50,000-word mark but I do have a mound of paper with a story in it sitting on my desk, so there you go. An explanation: in order to “win” at NaNo you must write at least 50,000 words. You get a nifty certificate suitable for framing for your efforts, so it’s well worth it.

There are also novels for 2006, 2007, 2008 and 2009. I skipped 2010 simply because there was no time. Some stressful personal stuff was happening and adding a novel to the mix was not going to work. Thing is, by not writing in November like tens of thousands of others made for its own kind of stress but hey, 2011 is another chance to slap some words on paper again.

All but one of the novels has a working title, and every single one needs a massive amount of work. I’m not discouraged by this because basically these thousands of words could be called an outline, something I wouldn’t have had without NaNo.

There is a murder mystery, a family drama, a business-type story and the untitled piece is a mystery to me because I’ve not re-read any of them. Once I found them on the computer I printed them out and soon I’ll pick one to work on. It’s much easier to have a paper copy to edit than try to strain the ol’ eyeballs for hours at a stretch on a computer screen.

Printing hundreds of pages requires ink and paper, and I ran out of both on both printers. Some copies ended up on blue paper but that was fine; however, when you run out of ink that’s not so good. I made a trip to the store, got ink, ran out again and made another trip.

Lessons learned along the way included remembering to use single spacing (uses less paper, but not the best for editing); using the ink-saving feature on the printers; and for goodness sake, keep track of what’s already been printed so you don’t print the same novel twice. I may have wasted ink, which makes me want to slap someone, but I’ll use the other side of the paper for the other two non-fiction books left to print.

A big part of this job is finding all I’ve written, getting it organized and into a word-processing program. Everything is printed, then clipped to keep it in order. Oh, and another lesson learned: put page numbers on everything. I was planning to use a three-hole punch on each book and put them into binders, but that’s a waste of time and effort. Giant paper clasps work much better and take about two seconds to attach.

I know the reason for this work-in-progress, even if I don’t remember how it all began. There are more publishing opportunities for writers now than ever and since the conventional means hasn’t worked for many of us, we have to look for other methods.

One more thing, and it’s pretty cool. Looks like a new writers group will start up this month. I’m excited, and when there’s more to tell, I’ll let you know. Provided I remember, of course.