While I'm not inclined to try to do the full Nanowrimo thing -- write 50,000 words during the month of November -- I took the opportunity this year to see if I could manage to write more frequently. My fiction writing has generally been one night per week, with word counts ranging from a low of about 150 words to a high of about 2,000, with about four to six hours time involved.
For November, I tried to set aside a half-hour per day. Didn't completely succeed at that -- weekends, when I work two 12-hour shifts at the day job, were especially difficult -- but I managed to get in 19 writing sessions, getting nearly 9,000 words written. I had started with about 1,000 words previously written on a story, and completed the first draft of "The Return of Dodge Tombstone, Outlaw-At-Large", with a day left to spare in November, at about 9,700 words total.
My general impression of that first draft is that it's noticeably rougher written than the work I've done in the once-a-week writing sessions. For the weekly sessions, I've usually been thinking about the story for the intervening days, so when I actually get words on paper, they're pretty well thought out and clean. (Bumper sticker version: "Write your second drafts first.") The daily-session stuff will need a greater amount of editing and revision.
The story itself is a straight Western, rather pulp-magazine-ish in flavor and feel. (Well, kinda straight; I always try to put some kind of twist or difference or weird shit into my stories.) Since the markets for short Western fiction are rather thin on the ground, I have no idea when or if it will ever see publication. Perhaps appropriately, certainly ironically, I may have shot myself in the foot by writing a Western story.
No comments:
Post a Comment