My parents used to live in a house beside a lake and had a beautiful view from their living room. I always enjoyed watching the lake freeze over as autumn slowly settled into winter. It would start with curiously undisturbed patches on the surface that were always revealed as the earliest sheets of fragile ice. As the temperatures continued dropping, these sheets would grow larger, wider, and more substantial with every passing day. Eventually I’d realize there was more ice on the lake than there was open water remaining, and not long after that the floes would join together until finally the entire surface was frozen solid.
Ice forming on a lake is a good analogy for what it’s been like for me over the past month during NaNoWrimo 2012. This year marks the fifth time I’ve met the 50,000 word goal, and the fourth time I’ve written the manuscript out on chronological order. You’ll notice I said up there that I met the goal -- I still have not yet finished the manuscript. That will be ongoing for a bit longer, and frankly I only have estimates of how much it’s going to take; my best guess right now would be somewhere between another 15,000-20,000 words. So even though most of my literary lake has frozen over, there are still enough gaps in the ice that my characters and plot could easily fall through if I’m not careful.
Those remaining thousands of words will take a little longer because I’m slowing down the pace for awhile and reclaiming a few other parts of my life. It will be nice to know I won’t have to stay in constant motion to keep up with my school work. I’m looking forward to reading a book or two, catching up on my DVR, and maybe evening trying to remember where I hid my XBox controller at the beginning of the month. I’ll be able to keep up with my Words With Friends games more often than just when I’m watching the news, and I won’t have to leave my phone in a different room when I sit down at the computer anymore. I think I’m still going to be waking up between 5:00 and 5:30 for awhile though; that’s a hard habit to just turn off. Maybe that’s just going to be my designated writing time until I work my way through the rest of the draft, and then I can worry about repairing my sleep patterns when winter break arrives. It’s going to be nice to open up the iTunes library to a wider variety of music again, since I’ve been limiting myself to the kind of alternative / industrial music my main character prefers. In fact, a lot of my chapter titles could pass for the titles of instrumental tracks by some of those bands: “Existential Firewalls;” “Kill the Memory;” “All the Lies We Tell Ourselves;” “The Pros and Cons of Quantum Suicide,” just to name a few.
And thankfully on the last day of the month I did FINALLY find a title for the book: “Revisionist Future.” The thing is the title doesn’t matter much; all it will need to do is be noticeable enough to get the attention of an agent when I start sending out query letters in a year or so. If it ever gets published (which has about the same odds of happening as me being struck by lightning and getting kicked by a Sasquatch at the same moment I’m buying a winning Powerball ticket), the title would almost certainly be changed. In fact, the one project I’ve ever seen carried into the light of day was a play a wrote that a community theater group produced a million years ago, and guess what! They changed the title to something they thought was more marketable, even if I quietly hated it. So as much as I like my title now, I have to accept it as the placeholder it is.
I’m happy to call this year’s endeavor a success. I kept a pretty steady pace for most of the month without pushing myself to finish early, knowing from the start I wouldn’t be able to finish the whole thing in just November. Last night I looked back at the goals I wanted to reach in the month and was happy to see I was there with most of them. With any luck I’ll have that first draft knocked off by winter break and will be able to start revisions a few weeks later, after I’ve given myself a mental break from the project. Hopefully this winter I’ll have a draft with one coat of polish on it that I’ll be ready to share with a first round of beta readers -- the small group of people who will read my once-revised draft and tell me how much it does or doesn’t suck. I’m hoping this time to enlist some people for the job from the target audience (13-18 years old), and with any luck even a few who don’t know me too well and would be able to bring some added objectivity to their perspective.
But until then, I still have some work to do. I’ll still keep you posted. Just not daily.
