Basically, the story of March was this: I went MIA for a bit, then looked over at my 2nd draft and decided that I needed a third rewrite. And then I went to China for two weeks for spring break. It was fantastic.
The story of April is this: After China, I came back, went MIA for some more, and had a week freaking out about my novel and decided that I should go plunge into it after a week of meticulous plotting.
And then the meticulous plotting basically translated into watching all sorts of NaNoWriMo pep talk videos on Youtube. Even though, you know, it was April, and Camp NaNoWriMo was already half over.
This rewrite was going from April 20th to May 29th. Which gave me exactly 40 days to pound out a suitable 3rd draft before BookExpo America. (Cue excited dance; this is my first time!)
And this time, I estimated that my final word count was to hover somewhere around 85,000 words. 85K.
This is absolutely crazy, and I know it. But the love for my story is still there. It 's not quite like the passion-filled, this-story-is-consuming-every-fiber-of-my-soul kind of obsessive love. But it has sweetened and mellowed.
Either way, I still don't know what I am doing. But I am plugging away at the novel, and I recently ran across a quote by the author Dave Eggers, from his pep talk from last Nano.
"You better do it now because you know how to write, and you have
fingers, and you have this one life, and during this one life, you
should put your words down, and make your voice heard, and then let
others hear your voice. And the only way any of that’s going to happen
is if you actually do it. People can’t read the thoughts in your head.
They can only read the thoughts you put down, carefully and with great
love, on the page.
So you have to do it, goddamnit. You have to do it,
and you can step back and be happy. You can step back and relax. You can
step back and feel something like pride."
Bravo, Dave. You will keep me going.
