Happy new year to one and all. Hope your holidays were all merry and bright, and you've launched yourselves into January with embarrassing vigour. I realise the 21st January is rather late to be saying all this - I have excuses for the belated-ness, but since most of them are 'I'm lazy', I'll spare you. But here we are, with only a little tarnish on the gleaming promise that is 2013, and I'm here to tell you that I've finally decided on my new year's resolution.
Hooray! I hear you cry.
Unlike other years, for which my resolutions have consisted of 'update blog, edit novel' (and I've had those two resolutions as long as I've had this blog, which is a considerable amount of time now), I decided this year to try for a new writing resolution. Something I might be able to stick to. And so, since January 1st (I always leave my resolutions till the last minute), I've been racking my brain for something that is both exciting and worthwhile, something I can really get my teeth into. It took an unexpected e-mail over the weekend to make me realise what that project is.
Back in 2010, I competed in my first NaNoWriMo (if no one knows what this is, firstly, shame on you, and secondly, take a look), and I wrote my 50,000 words with surprising ease. Certainly I haven't managed it since. But I get e-mails from them pretty much constantly, and this year, the wonderful folks that run NaNo have set up a 'What Now?' project, aimed at getting your scrappy, untidy mass of wordage into something resembling a real novel. And I thought - hey, my first NaNo is a scrappy, untidy mess of wordage, what if I work on that? And then I thought - there's lots more I can add to my NaNo too, lots of places to expand it. I bet I can get it to a proper novel length, no problem.
So, here is my resolution. I think there is the potential to double the word count of my little darling novellette, and so by the time we're waving 2013 out, I want to have 100,000 words, all neatly arranged, in the right order, and making sense. I want to dig out a beta reader or two to go through it for me, to be really harsh and put red lines through all the bits they don't like, but little smiley faces next to the bits they do like. I want (and this is going to be the tricky bit) to have something that I can bundle into a pdf, stick some cover art on, and turn into an e-book for the masses. I think that's a lot to ask, but honestly, considering how many of my other resolutions I've kept over the years, I'll be happy if I just get my word count. Because it's like they say - reach for the stars, and even if you fail, you'll still reach the moon.
For anyone with an interest in these sorts of things, I've put the current edition up on my Google drive here (I hope), and because I know people don't like reading things on computer screens, I've put it up as a pdf so you can download it and carry it everywhere you go, and show all your friends, and love it forever and ever (some of that list is optional). If the link doesn't work, let me know, and I'll try and figure out what's gone wrong. This is my first time using Google drive for general sharing of things, so it's bound to go screwy at some point. And the same disclaimer applies to this as to the rest of my blog - unedited work is rubbish, read at your own risk.
Well, that was a whole lot of words to say very little. Enjoy the rest of the shiny month of January, and good luck in whatever resolutions you've all made this year. (What do you mean, you've already broken them? The resolution fairy will haunt you at night, you know.)
Hooray! I hear you cry.
Unlike other years, for which my resolutions have consisted of 'update blog, edit novel' (and I've had those two resolutions as long as I've had this blog, which is a considerable amount of time now), I decided this year to try for a new writing resolution. Something I might be able to stick to. And so, since January 1st (I always leave my resolutions till the last minute), I've been racking my brain for something that is both exciting and worthwhile, something I can really get my teeth into. It took an unexpected e-mail over the weekend to make me realise what that project is.
Back in 2010, I competed in my first NaNoWriMo (if no one knows what this is, firstly, shame on you, and secondly, take a look), and I wrote my 50,000 words with surprising ease. Certainly I haven't managed it since. But I get e-mails from them pretty much constantly, and this year, the wonderful folks that run NaNo have set up a 'What Now?' project, aimed at getting your scrappy, untidy mass of wordage into something resembling a real novel. And I thought - hey, my first NaNo is a scrappy, untidy mess of wordage, what if I work on that? And then I thought - there's lots more I can add to my NaNo too, lots of places to expand it. I bet I can get it to a proper novel length, no problem.
So, here is my resolution. I think there is the potential to double the word count of my little darling novellette, and so by the time we're waving 2013 out, I want to have 100,000 words, all neatly arranged, in the right order, and making sense. I want to dig out a beta reader or two to go through it for me, to be really harsh and put red lines through all the bits they don't like, but little smiley faces next to the bits they do like. I want (and this is going to be the tricky bit) to have something that I can bundle into a pdf, stick some cover art on, and turn into an e-book for the masses. I think that's a lot to ask, but honestly, considering how many of my other resolutions I've kept over the years, I'll be happy if I just get my word count. Because it's like they say - reach for the stars, and even if you fail, you'll still reach the moon.
For anyone with an interest in these sorts of things, I've put the current edition up on my Google drive here (I hope), and because I know people don't like reading things on computer screens, I've put it up as a pdf so you can download it and carry it everywhere you go, and show all your friends, and love it forever and ever (some of that list is optional). If the link doesn't work, let me know, and I'll try and figure out what's gone wrong. This is my first time using Google drive for general sharing of things, so it's bound to go screwy at some point. And the same disclaimer applies to this as to the rest of my blog - unedited work is rubbish, read at your own risk.
Well, that was a whole lot of words to say very little. Enjoy the rest of the shiny month of January, and good luck in whatever resolutions you've all made this year. (What do you mean, you've already broken them? The resolution fairy will haunt you at night, you know.)
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