I opted out of NaNoWriMo this year so I could focus on my 2006 NaNo project, Neutral Zone, along with a short story that’s due this week.
The short story is for Nerdvana, an anthology that hits stores in Fall 2009. The collection focuses on nerds and geeks. To quote part of the call for submissions: “I want to hear about the social misfits, brainiacs, and comic book/superhero obsessed geeks… I want fiction that shows brains can be sexy.” I came up with a couple ideas pretty quickly and settled on one to flesh out. I wrote it last week and worked on polishing it this week. Tomorrow it’s off to the editor. Hopefully it will be a success.
Meanwhile, I’ve been back on Neutral Zone the past week or so. Work on it came to a grinding halt for nearly two months as the day job took center stage to get the Monopoly game ready. I’ve enjoyed getting back to the editing/polishing and working with the characters again. My goal is to spend at least an hour a day (and more if possible) on the edit work until I’m sure the novel is as good as I can make it.
I’m pleased to see that you’re continuing work on NEUTRAL ZONE. One of my criticisms of NaNoWriMo is that there’s nothing about it that says, “OK, now that you wrote a novel, take some time to make it good.” There are puh-lenty of people who start shopping around the first draft of what they finished during NaNoWriMo, not even considering that it should be revised.
It’s been a good couple of years working on NEUTRAL ZONE. I can’t imagine trying to sell what I wrote during NaNo. It was so rough. If you were to read the NaNo draft versus what I have now, you’d see the same basic plot along with many scenes carried through. There have, however, been major structural and point of view changes that, I believe, have strengthened the story
The end goal is to end up with something worth of selling, which I hope to have sometime in ’09.