Yes, I realize there’s still a day left in the month, but I don’t think anything especially interesting is going to happen in the next 26-ish hours.
So, yesterday I hit 50K words. In reality this is about 25K of actual words, with the other 25K being paper edits, readthroughs, tweaking, and other revision-related work that doesn’t equate to straight word count. It’s four or five complete chapters (I don’t remember what chapter I was on when the month started) which is a pretty good clip, especially since several of them required massive streamlining.
So I feel pretty good about how productive I’ve been this month! Definitely made good progress, and I’ve hit the halfway point in the story, so everything delightfully gets to fall apart now.
Something that I’ve done this year that I’ve not done in previous years is work at least a little bit every single day. This is no doubt helping with the progress. And it’s certainly less stressful than during the summer critique marathon, where I had a similar level of progress but was doing a chapter over two days a week.
Are the revisions actually good? Hopefully! I like revision in general but sometimes when you’re deep in the middle of it, it just feels like you’re making changes without making progress.
That being said, I did go through Cpts 11 and 12 with my critique group this past weekend, and so far so good. And on Friday, the group that runs the marathons is doing a December mini-marathon, where we post four or five chapters all at once and then have all month to do the critiques. I’m debating between starting where the summer marathon left off (so posting Cpt 9-14), or starting at where my critique group has gotten to (so posting Cpt 13-18). I’ll probably do the first, so people have seen the whole story thus far (also I’m not done with 17 and 18 and may not be before the 1st, but both are shorter chapters and so it is possible).
But I do need to put together a chapter summary of Chapters 1-8 to remind people what has already happened. Yay.
Another section of Across Worlds with You also needs to go live on Friday, and I still need to do my follow-up stuff from MileHiCon. Those are relatively easy, just need to do them.
And then the Winter Marathon starts in January, so if we maintain progress and don’t run into any major re-writes during the marathons, by the end of the winter marathon we could be through Chapter 22, which is about two-thirds of the way through the book. Not too shabby. We may finish this thing yet.
On the other hand, though, I’m not impressed with Nano’s handling of their current drama. The Board did send out an email to everyone so the entire userbase should know about it now, which I thought was good, but some of the language in it was pretty dismissive. And to continue to get standard Nano emails at milestones, asking for donations and acting like everything is fine when they’re facing allegations of turning a blind eye to grooming minors, is off-putting.
Human beings suck. This is why we can’t have nice things.
So, there we are. Another Nano and November in the bag, and on we blindly stumble, hopefully being at least a little productive around the holidays.
How was your November, squiders? Any big plans for December?
