Thank you patient readers, those of you that are still reading this blog. I don’t know if this is where the story of the Star Ship Beagle ends, but it is where it ends for now. You have witnessed the “publication” of the first draft of a story. It needs work. It definitely needs editing and parts of it may need rewriting. In the process it may change and evolve, for the better I hope.
I am planning to participate in National Novel Writing Month (or NaNoWriMo as it’s know to it’s friends) next month. I have done it twice before, once unsuccessfully, and once successfully. The challenge is to write a 50,000 word novel during the month of November. To do so, you have to hit an average of around 1700 words per day. When you finish you have a rough draft of a novel and a lot more confidence in your ability to write something on that scale.
On my first attempt, I caught the flue about ten days in and missed enough days that I never caught up. I’m not sure that I had enough story plotted for that first one to ever have been finished.
On the second attempt, I wrote a story that I had been plotting off and on for years. It took turns that I never expected and was far different than anything I had imagined before hand. But at the end of the month, I had a fifty thousand word first draft in hand. My computer died the December after that (the next month) and all I have is a backup of the original draft. I intend to go back to it and read it to see if it is salvageable sometime soon.
I will blog during the month of November but I don’t think I’ll write much fiction during that time. I expect it will be essays for the most part. I may give poetry another shot if I can figure out how to format it so that it survives the trip to Facebook.
I have been bitten by the writing bug hard. At this point, I know that I will write the rest of my life. I may not ever publish anything as such but I will blog and write things for my own amusement. I have an ambition to write for a local public radio station podcast called The Writer’s Corner. I may post that to my blog as well..
Sweet dreams, don’t forget to tell the people you love that you love them, and most important of all, be kind.