Okay. I will be, for the first time in seven years, participating in National Novel Writing Month. The last time I tried it, in 2007, I stopped after the second day of writing, not because I gave up or didn't have much story to go with, but because of some severe heartbreak that was impossible to disassociate from the story I had planned.
And pretty much every year after, I've been engaged in full projects and haven't really needed the outside motivation to write and complete a work.
Anyway, now I'm back on the NaNoWriMo scene. But for probably a slightly different project than most people.
Yesterday I finished the last scene of my novel No Romance. Earlier this year, in April-ish, I began the process of rewriting that book. I originally wrote it during the summer of 2012 and then put it through a developmental editing service at Leading Edge, BYU's spec-fic magazine. That dev edit was exactly what I needed: a lot of hard truths. Some of the original story worked, but not all of it, and definitely not the way I intended. So I put it aside for a long time, intending to come back to it and implement the changes suggested by the dev edit. Over the last couple of years, I've been re-imagining it, and the vision I had for it blew even me away. (By the way, I don't mean any self-praise for that---great visions for stories are easily come by; making them real is the hard part.) So, as I said, earlier this year I began to rewrite it.
I started at the beginning of what was formerly Act Two. I knew that (what was formerly known as) Act One would stay roughly the same, because much of it worked, so I left that alone and proceeded to work on the new Act Two and everything after that. Then I took a break for a few months to work on a couple of side projects and focus deeply on my collection of talks, To the Saints: A Rousing Cry. I am so grateful I took the time to revise that book because it is now being published by Cedar Fort---my first published book, and not self-published. I'm proud of that.
When I finished that book, around the end of August, I knew it was time to go back to No Romance and finish what I started. And so over September and October, I did that. I finished (what was formerly known as) Act Three, getting to last line at about 3:30 AM early Halloween morning. (That has turned out to be a tradition in my life; exactly a year previous, I finished the rewrite of Sea of Chaos after working all night from the 30th to the 31st.)
According to just about everyone I know who's read my stuff and is currently reading the new No Romance---and that includes me---my writing has improved a LOT over just these past two years, and this new version is leagues beyond the old one, not just in writing but in ideas and philosophical clarity. So now, with that improved ability, it has come time to rewrite Act One.
And that is my project for this year's NaNoWriMo.
It probably won't be the required length usually associated with NaNoWriMo (50,000 words), partly because I plan on chopping about a third from the original version, but I do consider it a month-long effort nonetheless, and I do intend on joining the community of participating novelists, both online and in our local public library which I'll be visiting close to daily.
And so, hopefully by the end of November, I'll have, along with my fellow writers, a complete novel, though perhaps one closer to its final form.
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