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Nano Is Not For Editing

Inner Editor

Sorry inner editor Illisa, you’re going back in the drawer.


Oh man, I hate to admit defeat, but here I have to.

No! Not on Nano completely, just on the editing. 🙂

I can’t keep up with this whole going by the clock instead of how much you actually do thing.  The only reason I was able to do Nano the last two years is because I can let the brain loose and the fingers fly and pound out 1000 words in 20 minute word wars.

When you’re editing, it doesn’t matter how much you get done, you count an hour as 1000 words.

That being said, I have gotten a huge chunk of editing done and I’m going to need to keep up that pace in December. The book is still so far from being done that I’m going to have to do 1 to 2 hours of editing a day in December just to get it to possibility of being done by the end of the month and sent to the editor then betas.

Yes, this is the book I so naively thought would be ready to go by October.

I was going to do the 3 in 3 thing, where you put out the first 3 books in a series in 3 months or so. I was going to do Oct, Nov, and beginning of Jan. I’m still going to do something similar, but since I’m pushed back so far, I’m going to have to take a slightly different approach.

December is a horrible time to publish. All the big blockbuster books get released around end of November up until Christmas and everyone is buying those if they’re buying books for people, or they are buying other presents. They aren’t spending money on themselves.

Conversely, January is actually a good time for Indie because of Christmas. Everyone who got a Kindle, Amazon gift card, and/or Kindle Unlimited subscription for  Christmas goes onto Amazon to find stuff that’s free, cheap, and interesting so it’s a good time to put out deals and put stuff on sale.  I was going to have my third book come out in January and put the first up for 99 cents for a week to hook the bargain seekers.

The plan now, if I can get the damn thing done, is to publish the first book in January, second in March and third in April, because February is just a terrible month for trying to sell books. I really don’t know how a new book in a new series will do in January. It’s a good time to put out deals, but maybe not so much to put out new stuff. So I’ll have to see.

Unless I still don’t get my shit together in time for that deadline, in which case it’ll be pushed back to March.

Anyway, I went off on a tangent there. The point of the post is Nanowrimo is not for editing 🙂 It’s set up to get you to write, hopefully every day, to build the habit, and to get stuff out fast enough to bypass your inner editor (mine’s name is Illisa and yes, that is my drawing that looks like it was done by a 5 year old, and yes, I physically put her in a drawer when I’m writing a first draft) and pound out a workable rough draft. There’s word wars if competition gets your juices flowing, crawls if the create your own adventure type of thing works for you, and the push to create, not fix.

So I’m just going to finish editing in December and try like hell to write 35K in 12 days in the third book in the series to get it out.

This is my third year doing Nano. I’ve won twice now, but that’s hardly a streak, to get a streak going, ya gotta have at least four, can’t get there if you don’t hit the third.

So I’ve put Illisa back in the drawer, grounded myself from social media, and am going to write! 🙂

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