Today marked day one of April. What’s so great about that? Well, for some that would be the kickoff of Camp NaNoWriMo. National Novel Writing Month supports two spring- and summertime novelling months in addition to the original NaNoWriMo. (Fun fact: did you know that the first NaNoWriMo was held in June, not November?) One year, I took half of a Camp month to finish my previous years’ book, and Tammy has done that, too. Neither of us have unfinished works this year, but I do now have a collection of six novel drafts, none of them edited. It’s starting to get a bit embarrassing, actually.
So in the interest of polishing up at least one of them, I’m dedicating April 2014 to editing my 2013 draft. There is a good chance that this November I would like to write a sequel to this one, but there’s no way I can do that without editing first.
So we’ll see how it goes. Neither Tammy nor I have any experience really editing a novel, and part of it is figuring out what tools work for you. Unlike in the first draft, characters’ names can’t change from chapter to chapter, and the whole thing actually needs to be coherent. That means keeping track of all the facts and events. Tammy uses an application called Scrivener for her writing, but I can’t seem to warm up to it. I’m trying Apple’s Pages and using a wiki to keep my notes.
It’s the 14th of the month now, and we’ve kept at it. Perhaps not with the same gusto as November, but pretty well. I have edited 20,300 of the 70,000 words in the draft text. That includes adding about 4,000 words so far. I won’t finish the whole draft by the end of the month, but I can envision doing it before November this year.