In which I review the rash declaration made earlier

So at the start of the year I rashly declared that before another January came around I would be in a position to query agents with an actual, bona fide novel of my own.  And then I went quiet, because getting to that position meant focusing on novel drafts rather than blog posts.

The good news is that all of that work has paid off.  Iron and Gold has been through multiple drafts this year, and I finally reached the point where I'm, well, not happy with it because you can never be entirely happy with a story, but as content as I can be that it's as good as I can make it.  And so I've formatted it properly, and written a synopsis, and written a query letter, and sent it out to a few agents.  Now all I have to do is sit back and wait for the rejections to come rolling in...

Obviously, I hope somebody likes it.  I hope it gets picked up, because I really like these characters and I want to write the other two books that I have in mind with them.  But just in case, I'm going to crack on with other things instead.

Helpfully, I've got NaNoWriMo looming to help with that.  I have a plot in mind, but there's still a certain amount of worldbuilding to be done.  I've got lizard people, and a matrilinear human society, and two different calendar systems, and a not-quite-murder mystery, and a host of characters, but I still need a few more names and things.  And a title.  I've no idea what this one is going to be called yet, but it'll come.

And if NaNo this year gets derailed by a deluge of responses from agents?  Well, that won't be such a bad thing now, will it?

Untitled, like its subject

Every November, I write a terrible novel.

The National NovelWriting Month challenge is reasonably well-known these days, I think, and involves churning out a first draft of at least 50,000 words within the 30 days of November. I've been doing it since 2005, mostly because I find it an absurd amount of fun but also because it affords me the opportunity to transfer the stories in my head onto paper.

One upshot of having done it for so long is that 50,000 words really isn't that much of a challenge any more. It's not that much of a novel by modern standards, either. So I've taken to setting myself harder challenges instead. In 2012 I had ideas for two separate-but-related paranormal romances, one with zombies, one with demons. Rather than choose between them I elected to write them both and aim for 100,000 words in total. Parts of it were undeniably fun; there was zombie sex with parts falling off at inopportune moments; there was tentacle sex with at least fifteen tentacles; and there was a decidedly D/s threesome where the two gentlemen were technically the same person and the lady was under orders to obey one and not the other. Writing that many words in such a short amount of time nearly did for me, though. I struggled with RSI (never normally a problem) and had a massive meltdown in week three when the effort of sustaining the pace finally caught up to me. I made it to the target in the end, but it was only by the skin of my teeth.

So for 2013, 100,000 words was definitely out of the question. Instead I set myself the more manageable target of 75,000 words, but with a determination to get that much out of a single story. Much of what I've written over the years has petered out shortly after 50k, and I was keen to finally write something that would run a little longer. In the end, that story got to 78,000 within November and was finally finished in the following week at around 82,000. It's the longest first draft I've ever written, and I'm surprisingly pleased with it even now.  It's a tricky tale that starts as the story of a bored wife embarking on an illicit affair, takes a sudden left turn into urban fantasy with musings on the philosophy of creativity and ends, as all the best stories do, in betrayal and tragedy.

Why am I talking about this now, in January? It's a long time until next November and the next NaNoWriMo project (for which I'm thinking of tackling gothic horror). It comes back to the idea of challenges. I can write a first draft. I can knock out a story in a month, but it'll be baggy and uneven, and things will change mid-story as ideas suddenly come to me. It's not something I can share, except possibly with a couple of trusted beta readers. I need to get better at editing, at spending the other eleven months of the year putting in the graft that's needed to knock that story into shape, rather than leaving it languishing on my hard drive forever.

So this is my declaration: I will edit this novel, this year. I will put in some effort, and work on those words, until I have something I can be proud of for more than just the speed at which it was written. I say this here, so it's in writing. I can't go back on this pledge now, and anyone who reads this can chase me about it and ask me how it's going. And if it's not going, they can ask me why the hell not and refuse to accept any excuses from me.

I will edit this novel, this year. I will.

Make me.