Wow, where'd the time go?

I just realized that the National Novel Writing Month ended a good two weeks ago, and I haven't said a thing about it here. Long story short, I made it. 52,568 words in one month.

I don't know if the last part of the novel could be exactly called an ending. That's one spot where I normally have trouble in my writing, figuring out when and how to bring it all to a conclusion. Even with these blogs, I usually sit around staring at the last paragraph and thinking "Ok, now how do I bring this all together without making it look like I just walked away from the keyboard at a random point?"

I think part of the problem in this case was that when I hit 50,000 words, I realized I was only at about the 2/3 mark. I had a lot more I wanted to do with the novel from that point, which I had known from the outset would be the case. But, then I got to 52,000 words, and I still didn't see the end in sight. So, I just wrapped up what I was working on there, ended that section of the book, and said "Ok, I can call this done."

I don't know when I'll get back to it. I want to flesh it out some more, get to the actual ending. But I was already in the middle of a couple other things when I started this project. I have some notes here from editors who read two of my stories. My first priority is to read those notes, go over the stories with a fine toothed comb, and figure out what adjustments to make.

I think I may have said this before in this blog, but the notes I have here from one of the editors who read "Long and Short" seem to stem from the fact that I revised the story heavily several times. The draft I have now is about half as long as the original draft. A lot of that was dead wood. I was trying to tell two or three stories at once. But it looks like I may have removed more than I should have. I'll have to consider that carefully in my next draft of the story.

The other critique is a bit meatier, and I nearly slapped myself on the forehead at one comment. I fell into the dangerous writing trap of telling rather than showing early on in the story. That's the first thing I'm going to have to work on.

I'm almost done with school now, so I'll have a lot more free time. That means no more excuses for slacking on my writing. Heck, if I was able to pound out a 50,000 word novel while attending class, I should have no problem revising my latest story, and getting to work on the next.

I think I'll send "Where Do We Go From Here" to Leading Edge. They say they'll consider anything up to 15,000 words, and this one is about 11,000, so that shouldn't be a problem. Maybe I'll finally strike gold with this one. And while I'm waiting on that, I have "Little Lucy" to work on. Time to get back into the wild world of publishing.

-E. Maxfield Moen