Tuesday, February 27, 2007

Um... yeah, well...

As I'm editing works and creating covers for the excerpts, I thought I might do the three books I did for last year's NaNo.

It is always a good idea to let your works settle before you go back to them; six months is good, three okay, a month if you have to. It's been two, so I figured I was safe to delve back into that world.

But first... I had to reconstitute them. As a measure of my progress, I write a file a day. Each file is named, Day One, Day Two and so on. When done, I have an exact word count to put into my database. On the downside, I then have to put the manuscript together by cutting and pasting.

So I'm happily doing this (although the novelty - hah! - wears off quickly) and what do I discover? Book three isn't finished. I wrote like I was possessed for three and a bit solid weeks and then stopped before the end of the month; before the final book was done! Something else possessed me, but I'm damned if I can think of what. There were no other files to add - not anywhere on my hard or thumb drives. Just Day TwentySix. Nothing else.

I left my protagonist hobbling through a jungle on crutches, trying to escape the armed enemy - she's gotta be pissed about that - and twelve thousand words short of the end.

I've stopped writing books before this because the story bored me, or I'd written myself into a corner; the former is always a good reason to stop, the latter, well, I'm still waiting for the solution. I can always go back and rewrite so it doesn't happen. But this is the first time I've left a book hanging for no reason I can recall.

I'm going to finish it this week, there's no reason not to - no reason I'll allow to stop me. Now, it's all about wallowing in writing again, so I'll set my editing and cover artist hats aside and get back to adventure... with a little romance thrown in...

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