Recruiting

Sunday afternoon, though it feels like Sunday evening with the darkening sky. Still not used to the time change.

I'm going to hit 30,000 words today before I go to bed. This puts me just a little ahead of my self-assigned NaNo pace, and hopefully still on the way to reaching my goal of somewhere between 60,000 and 70,000 words by the end of the month.

I'm finding that more than usual, I'm anxious to see what people will think of this project. Most of the time when I write something and I get a certain amount of progress done, I get excited about sharing it because I feel so confident about the responses being positive, which is how most writers would think at the end -- why bother with the effort if the book going to suck?

But this time, I'm anxious for opinions just because I really don't know how this one is going to work. Will it connect with people on multiple levels like I'm kind of intending it to do? Will the imagery work? The parallels? The characters? I just really, really don't know. My stock answer right now when I talk about this is that people will either take to it in the way I'm hoping, or they will politely describe it as "interesting."

So, I'm asking ahead of time for anyone reading this: If you've ever read anything else I've written before or even if you haven't, would you like to see this thing when it's done? I don't feel any remorse in being this shameless about asking. Usually I don't ask people directly to read anything because it seems that almost EVERY TIME I do, they'll say yes because they feel obligated to after I've asked,and then they just let it sit around for months before they read it, if they ever do at all. Which bothers me a little, but not tons because it'd be tough trying to win over a non-motivated reader in the first place. But this time it's different, because when I hit The End I'll be curious right away, and if I know ahead of time how many people I can send the file to, I don't have to bother waiting for reaction from one or two people at a time. Now, I'm talking about a PDF file, so you'd be reading it off a computer screen. For some people at longer distances, this is really the only option. People more local, we can probably work something out with printed copies. But once it's done I want to get it out there.

So, if you'd like to see it, just leave a comment, either here or on the Facebook link that will lead to this post. A simple "yes" with your name will be plenty. I don't want to say too much about it ahead of time, but just so you have some idea I'll say this much: It's a novel written for older children (no surprise). It's not scary. Nobody dies.

Anybody want to help me out here? You've got sixteen days to decide.