#NaNoWriMo and Finished Novels

Hola folks.

I’m departing from the chapters posting tonight to talk about other things.  Three things, in fact.

1) I finished another novel last night.  This one is called Out-Dweller, and it is the sequel to Glimmer Vale.  I decided a little while back that I really really enjoy the Glimmer Vale world and characters, and I wanted to go back to them.  Several of my beta readers (but amazingly no reader readers…although to be fair GV hasn’t had that many of those) agreed and have been pestering me to hurry the hell up and write a sequel.

So I did, and it was fun.  It came it at just over 60k words, so it’s about 6,000 words longer than Glimmer Vale.  I don’t envision any of the Glimmer Vale Chronicles (that’s the series title now) being much longer than that.  My concept for these books is to keep them short (for novels) and fun.  Considering that the setting is a mixture of fantasy and a western, I think it’s ready-made for the fun part, anyway.  🙂

Anyway, Out-Dweller is off to the beta readers.  Meanwhile, James Beveridge, the guy who did Glimmer Vale’s cover, is just about finished with the cover for Out-Dweller.  I’ll post the finished version here and on Facebook when it’s ready.  Trust me, it’s pretty kick-ass.  Then I think I’m going to run another Goodreads giveaway in the second half of November for Glimmer Vale, to prime the pump for Out-Dweller’s release, if you will.  Naturally I’m going to do a giveaway for Out-Dweller as well, but I think I’ll wait until I know better what day it will really be ready to go before I plot that scheme too much.

So that’s the first thing.  Pretty cool, right?

*defeaning silence*

Exactly.

Right, item the second:

2) I’m doing NaNoWriMo again this year.  I think I promised that before, but it’s all official now.

You may (or may not) recall that I won NaNo in 2011 with Glimmer Vale, and failed it last year with a bunch of short stories.  I want to say I got 33k-ish words done last November: nothing to mock, but not enough for NaNo.  This year, I’m going to deviate from my initial plan a bit.

Well, sort of.

Recall that I planned to finish Out-Dweller a couple months ago, return to work on the sequel to Masters of the Sun, then get to Glimmer Vale 3 for NaNo and finish up Masters 2 in December and into the New Year.  Clearly I gooned that plan right up if I only finished Out-Dweller last night.

So I’m skipping Masters 2 and going straight into Glimmer Vale 3, starting tomorrow when NaNo begins.  And I have no idea what’s going to happen in it.  With Out-Dweller, I had a rough notion.  For this one?  Not a clue.  So it’ll be interesting.

But that brings me to…

Item the third.

3) We are buying a house here in San Diego.  Well, Chula Vista, but it’s close enough to San Diego proper that calling it San Diego is close enough.  It’s a pretty kick-ass place and will give us a lot more room for the munchkins to do what munchkins do.  And for Mommy and Daddy to do what Mommies and Daddies do.  We’re closing on 20 November, and then will be moving in shortly thereafter.

Guess what that does for my NaNoWriMo schedule?

I’ll be taking a couple weeks of leave to facilitate the move-in, but even without work hanging over my head it’s going to be busy.  Busy.  Busy.  Odds of getting a lot of writing done in the last week and a half of this month?  Pretty low, I’m thinking.

Which means I need to finish Glimmer Vale 3 (or at least get it to 50,000 words) by the 20th.

Impossible?

Nah.  In July 2011, I cranked out just under 30,000 words in ten days, as a challenge to myself while the better half and kids were out of town.  That’s a greater daily word count than I’ll need to pull this off now.  Of course, the better half and munchkins are not out of town, and we’ll have moving preps to do over the next couple weeks.  And I still have work.  But hey, it’s just 2,500 words/day.  I write about 1,500-1,700 words/hour.  Given that, it’s only an hour and a half to an hour and 45 mins a day.  Go a bit longer on the weekends to add a bit of buffer.

Totally doable.

I just have to actually do it.  Which means no screwing off on the internet, I guess.  *sigh*

And speaking of screwing off on the internet, I think I’ve done enough of that for one evening.  I’m going to hit the rack, then get up early to get started on Glimmer Vale 3, and NaNoWriMo.

Have a great night, everybody.  Wish me luck!

🙂