Words About Writing

Aha! Building on my idea from my last post, I have decided to try Camp Nanowrimo once more. I did it once and it wasn't great for me - seemed pointless - but this year seems a better set up. I've made my goal a timing one. Two hours per day. I can EITHER be adding to the old, troublesome, pantser-style, draft OR when my other wip comes back, I'll dive into editing. Two hours per day, and whatever it is, it is progress. The trick will be to beat the heat. It's very easy to just lay in air conditioning and read instead of sit out at my sweltering desk area and try to be functional. That will be my sisyphean boulder. A month ago, my goal was to be lining up beta-readers to start in July. Ah well. Life.

You know how I wasn't sure what to do next with my WIP? I figured out a plan of action. Before I dive in and do yet another edit, I have one person reading through to make suggestions on which sections could stand some beefing up or fat-trimming. Meanwhile, for the last few days, I've been itching to just get in and start skimming it myself. But today I came to a solution that will work. I think. It would be a waste for me to go through and start looking for places to fix, when someone else is doing that for me. After I get back their notes, I can tackle everything. In the meantime, what's a writer to do? I'm floundering. Solution: Review a different book. I have five novels in various draft stages in my computer. I don't want to get sucked too deeply into a side project, though, so I'm going to take the one at the simplest stage and fix some background work. One of the five novels is not even a complete first draft yet. I started it to try my hand at "lett