Rather than leave it more than a year (like I did in my last post where I talked about National Novel Writing Month) I decided to update this side of New Year. So, yes I met the 50,000 words goal for NaNoWriMo for my novel Sunder (working title). And there was a joyous outcome from this year’s NaNoWriMo experience, considering my previous attempts:

I don’t hate what I’ve written and want to finish the story and redraft it!

Seriously, after writing over 150,000 words across three different NaNoWriMo years, it’s nice to finally have something I want to go back to and finish.

Next steps

I haven’t done much work on the story since November finished, but I am still jotting down ideas on what to do to keep the base story moving.

I think having a reasonably detailed (by my standards) outline has really helped. It’s taken me a while to find a tool I like for that kind of thing and I’d say that Scapple from Literature & Latte is my go to at the moment. I’ll make some notes in something like Evernote or in a physical notebook, especially world building stuff, but getting those plot points down is definitely something I like doing with a visual tool.

So, I’m probably going to start looking at the story again with a view to finish it in the New Year (I’m crafting a lot for the holidays, making gifts for loved ones, so writing has slowed down for the moment).

Once the draft is complete, I’ll be printing the lot off and editing sections by hand, taking myself away from my PC initially. Why? I found the process worked real well for me when I wrote and redrafted a feature film script for my final Masters project at uni.

Am I going to seek out an agent and/or publisher?

I think it depends on how I feel after redrafting the story.

It needs finishing, additions, redrafting and editing, and I know that very well. I’m definitely not feeling precious about what I’ve written so far but I know I need a full draft before I do any redrafting or refining. At some point, I should also probably see about trying to get it proofread too.

And there will be a point where that full draft is in a state I could try shopping around.

I’m not actually keen on self-publishing as a default, but I know that option is there for me if I don’t get anywhere with more traditional routes.

Additional next step…

I also need to properly go through my winners’ goodies from NaNoWriMo. I think I’ll be treating myself to the newer version of Scrivener with the voucher code that’s been provided. I’m still on a really old version of the software and was kinda waiting to see if I could succeed at NaNo before paying out for an upgrade as I suspected there would be a money-off code in the goodies 😅

I have actually got a copy of Scrivener 3 that I’ve been using for occasional bits of content at work. Mainly bigger pieces and script work (I actually used the comic script template on it the other week and was happy with how it auto-formatted the short comic script I wrote for a 4-panel comic strip). But it’s a work bought piece of software and not my own.

Anyway, I need to make sure I back up projects and settings. Apparently you can have both versions installed at the same time, so I will be taking advantage of that as I move from old to new.

Until next time

I haven’t made much headway on my reading list since my last post. But I’ve got over two weeks off for Christmas and New Year’s, and I’m almost done with making gifts. So, I’m probably going to be reading, gaming and knitting something for myself while I chill out over my break.

Speaking of knitting, I tend to binge watch shows when I knit and I think I am probably going to need to talk about Prodigal Son here and on Nerds Assemble soon. I watched the whole show this past week.