If you go on the writing projects page of my website, you'll see that the first project, DREAMING, is the one that I've worked on the most. I've even noted that I'm preparing to query it (with is super scary but also super exciting!!!).
During this eventful year, I've had a very hard time keeping up and finding time and energy to work on this project. However, I have had the opportunity to have a final critique partner look at it from start to finish, which really helped to sort out small and big problems. These past couple of weeks, I've been going through the last major inconsistencies, adding details or scenes where something was missing. Finally, these week, I am going to convert my word document to a kindle book so as to read it like a real book and see if there are any final issues to be sorted out. In parallel, I'll also have to look back on and refine my query letter and synopsis. Yikes. The worst one of the two, in my opinion, is the query letter, because you have to find the right voice and really push your novel to stand out. Plus, it'll be the first thing literary agents see. So that's my update for DREAMING. It's extremely daunting to finally get this book out into the world since I've been working on it for so long. Meanwhile, I will also be working on my other projects, but I hope hope hope that DREAMING goes somewhere. I believe in it! Here's my accountability timeline so that I can force myself to actually send it out:
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I won Camp Nanowrimo July! But at what cost? For those who don't know, Nanowrimo is a month where you write a 50,000 word novel. In other words, normally you'd be writing an average of about 1,600 words every day. It's a great way to build resilience and gain a writing habit. I've participated many times and this time I won after 2 weeks. Or did I? It's kind of complicated. This month, I was going to write a whole new project, but truth be told, the subject matter of said novel was a bit dark and really didn't agree with my mental health this month. So, I decided to ease up the workload and to edit an existing project rather than write a whole new one. And while editing is also work, it's easier and faster to edit through a thousand words than to write those, at least in my case. On the NaNoWriMo website, you can put in whether you're writing or editing 50,000 words in the month. However, at the end of the day, it still counts 'edited' words as 'written' words. For example, I ended up having 'written' 10,000 words in one day, according to the website, with writing speeds of up to 75 words per minute, ha. The novel I've been editing was my actual NaNoWriMo project from last year, where I really did write 50,000 words in a month. I really was on a row back in the day! Since then, the novel has grown considerably, and completely changed in some aspects. See, that year I had the brilliant idea of writing in a non-chronological style. Which made the novel impossible to follow or organize. So this year, I've been editing it to make it chronological. This will make it easier to check for consistencies. But this also means that the beginning of the initial novel ends up being towards the middle of the new version. A total mess! Even though I officially won, as I've gone through 50,000 words, that doesn't mean I'm done with editing. Far from it, since the novel is a quite longer than that. As such I'll be working on it well after this month is done! For the time being, however, I am more focused on my main WIP which I'm going to query this August! Very exciting times! Below are my stats for the project. Be sure to add me on nanowrimo! My profile name is J. Dietz! Let me know below what you did for nanowrimo! Hi all! I have returned from a somewhat hiatus, but my job as an English teacher is finally coming to a close. Oof. Let me tell you, this year cost a lot of energy - more than I had ever bargained for. See, I may look alright from the outside (or so I hope), but inside, I feel like this: Now that I can once again focus all of my attention to writing, I'm going to be able to come back and post more often. But just to really bring home the point that I've been exhausted and overwhelmed by the almost 90 students I've had under my responsibility, this is my progress for NaNoWriMo camp of April 2022: As you can see, an absolute disaster. I had no time, motivation or energy to work on my project.
But enough of that, let's move on to now! First and foremost, I am currently rereading for the 1000th time my primary WIP to verify the background world-building and character development, and also to see that there are sufficient clues and foreshadowing elements for the ending not to be too out of the blue. Secondly, another book taking place in that same ''bookverse'' is coming along nicely. To organize the chronology of the novel (as a lot happens with causes and consequences), I wrote the chapter titles on little bits of paper and arranged them manually to have an overview and make sure everything made sense. Writing books is so crazy sometimes and it's hard to remember what happens when and in what order! But then again, it's also quite entertaining to try and order things around like a detective trying to put together a puzzle. Finally, camp NaNoWriMo for July 2022 isn't just around the corner, it's started today! Agh help! This morning, still at work, I started writing for a new project, typing it on my phone whenever I had a minute to spare. I managed 500 words so I'm going to need just about the double of that to reach today's goal. I'm going to add the writing project to my WIP page on this blog, but it's been in my thoughts for quite some time now (2 years to be accurate). I'm mixing a few ideas together because they're all quite similar. In any case, I'm going to have a lot of fun with the concept that I came up with! The project is a contemporary fiction with an unreliable narrator. More infos to come soon, so stay tuned! That's it for now, and I hope I'll find my way back to the blog soon! Hope you're all having a great week and happy holidays to those who have the summer off! |