Huff, Puff...

Whew, it's dusty around here!

Yeah, guess that's what happens when you ignore your blog and don't post for a couple days--ahem--weeks.

I do apologize for my absence, but I was kind of caught up in the whole NaNoWriMo stuff. In the 30 days of November, I produced 55,814 words. (That's according to NaNo's word count validator. Per my word counter, I clocked in at 56,018.). Unfortunately, I didn't achieve my true objective, which was to actually finish the novel. I figured my story would take about 60K words to complete but when I was about 20,000 words in, I decided to start over.

What? You started over? Are you crazy?

Yes.

Let me explain. From the very first paragraph, my point-of-view was all wrong. It was third person omniscient, and that's not where I wanted to be. I wanted to be in my character's heads, telling their story from their POVs, not as some standoffish entity, hovering over their heads, revealing what's going on around them with the bland narrative quality of a newspaper. But, hey, this is just the first draft. It's allowed to be crappy. So I kept writing and it kept getting crappier and crappier. There were a few glimmers of brilliance in there, but they were hard to see, being surrounded by all that crap.

So, after talking over the plot with a friend, I decided to start fresh. And boy, was it ever fresh! I was finally in my character's head and telling her story from her POV. So I guess I really only produced 35,000 words, but I did write those first 20,000 and they count, even though they're currently on the chopping block, ready to be sliced, diced and julienned into oblivion.

November 30 came and went, and I took a couple weeks off to let my brain regenerate. Now I'm back and ready to write. My plan is to finish the first draft and then let the story sit for a while before I begin editing. While my story, "Daughter of the King" sits and gels, I'll start working on one of my other manuscripts. What I'm tentatively calling "The Penn Chronicles" is one story, 1/3 complete, and ideas for 3 more stories, so I have some work to do.

So if you'll excuse me, I'll get back to work!