A to Z Blogging: Nano-ing Again

While November is Nanowrimo, I guess April is Camp Nanowrimo... which is different in that you can set your own word count goal. And I'm gathering that everything is also much more low key.

But since I've been in the midst of revising (ah that's such an official term! I want to say something like... fixing!) the stuff I wrote in November, I thought, why not? And joined up with Camp Nano. I'm thinking that this was the initial purpose for Camp Nano anyway, for all the November Nano-ers to set aside a month for fixing.

So I've been fixing... revising... my story. And it's really hard to actually call that writing. I mean, how do you determine a word count when all you are doing is fixing and changing words around? But the other day, one of the Camp Nano dudes during the live stream said he calculated every 1 hour of revising as 1000 words. I liked that! So now to determine how many hours I've worked on my story this month....

I have no idea.

But it's a good handful. And it's fun. Yes, it really is fun. It's great to take all those messy words and turn them into something.... not quite as messy. And to figure out where more detail needs to be, or where less detail needs to be. And then share them and let others tell you. And then hopefully they'll say, "hey, that's... not too bad really." Or maybe they'll say, "Um.. yeah... so it's pretty bad. This is how you fix it!"

But I get discouraged when I go to the conferences and/or workshops and they say.... "your first novel is crap you know. You won't have anything good until your, I don't know, 16th novel or so!" Which makes me want to stop working on this my first novel and start some others so I can get the 16th one! Why waste time on this my first one, right? That's what I hear when  they say stuff like that!

Because, speaking of time, the other bit that's discouraging is the part when they say, "Yeah, so this will take awhile. Yeah, probably like 20 years or something before anything will happen."

That's all well and good if you start this process in your 20s or even 30s. But what if I'm nearly 50? Yeah... what then? I might be DEAD by 70!!!

But still... I'm revising away, because truly, I have no expectations other than learning and enjoying the process and just the ability to say, I've done this thing.


(For more A to Z posts, here's the main website link.)