I set myself a goal of writing 1,000 words a day in September and October. I set the goal on September 3rd, but had already started hand writing the novel in a notebook, so I was on track already. It would have bugged me if I didn’t get a round 30,000 words out of September, so I made sure to backdate my goal-setting. My idea is that I will have a novel by the end of October, and then write the second novel for NaNoWriMo in November.
And then here’s the crazy part. I am going to ask a few people to read them, make some light edits, and publish them as eBooks right away. No rewriting afterwards. Why am I doing this when it goes against all conventional wisdom about writing and what makes books good? Well, I was inspired by this post by Dean Wesley Smith in his Killing the Sacred Cows of Publishing blog series that will soon become a book. So, even though I was trained all through high school, college as an English major, and by life in general that the first draft is never good and you need to spend years and years rewriting things, I am going to try following Heinlen’s Rules as mentioned in that post.
And I have my own experience to tell me this just might work, too. Even though the idea of endlessly rewriting was ingrained in me by my training, I thought back to a conversation that my good friend Cindy and I had once. We joked about how, over the years of being English majors, we’d thought that we’d have gotten better about planning our time and starting long papers earlier so that we’d have enough time to write them properly. Instead, we said, “We just get better and better at writing good papers at the last minute!” And it’s true.
So, I haven’t been blogging so much, because I’m busy writing, but I am also learning the ropes of eBook publishing. I published a short story here, called Nicolas’s Story, and am working on getting some others up. I am also going to publish through Kobo and the Nook store, just as soon as I have time. I don’t know when that will be, haha. I also need to figure out how to accomplish pretty covers, but for now I just used Amazon’s cover creator thingy. I don’t really expect to sell lots of stories or books right away. I plan to just keep writing and adding over time. Kind of like what I’m doing with my Squirrel Seeds shop on Etsy.
Happy first day of Fall!
