Day 1: NaNo-1, flitgirl-0

Today marks the first official day of NaNoWriMo. It was also All Saints' Day for all you Catholics in the house (big ups to my peeps), so I was singing with the choir this evening and...yeah, I didn't work on the NaNo book. I'm right in the middle of editing chapter 4 of Wedding Widow and I'd really like to get to a good ending point before putting the revisions away to (briefly) work on another project. And apply to grad school. Sheesh.

So the plan is to start tomorrow. And after almost a year of working on my first draft I'm a little intimidated by the thought of a new project. Maybe it's because I'm not actually done with WW yet, so I don't feel ready to put it to bed and move on. I have this fear that I'll be unable to get back to it. Probably irrational, but there you go.

I also have to confess I'm taking the coward's path to NaNo. You have to write 50,000 words in one month, which I plan to do. But 50,000 words as a publisher counts them, not Microsoft Word does. You see, I had a bit of a nasty surprise when I finished the Wedding Widow, thinking it was about 15,000 words too long. I didn't write it in proper manuscript submission format and I kept track of my length with Microsoft Word Count function. When I switched it over to proper ms form, I realized it's waaaaaay too long. Like, 200 pages too long. That's a lot of cutting.

So, for November YA, I'm bagging the competition aspect and writing the whole thing in proper ms format from the very beginning. I don't like cutting.

Ideally, I'll be able to post my first excerpt sometime this week.

Kate, how goes things on your end?