Failure Novella
Ah, here it is, the last day of November, the last day of NaNoWriMo. And I don't have a novel.
I do have a novella, though.
I realized, a few days back that I wouldn't be reaching the 50,000 word mark. So, instead of killing myself trying to reach that mark, I simply finished off the story and spent a few hours doing some cursory editing. Basically, I fixed typos and cleaned up a tiny amount of text.
Depending on how you count, I ended up with between 27,835 and 28,137 words.
Now, when people actually succeed at NaNoWriMo, they often do a few different things:
- Blindly submit it to random agents. This is a bad idea. Nobody writes 50,000+ words of literary gold in a month. Nobody.
- Spend the next year editing and polishing their novel, then submit it to agents. Of course, if you intend on publishing your novel, this is what you should do, instead of #1 above.
- Put the novel away somewhere and never let it see the light of day again. From what I've seen, this is what most folks do. Sometimes, it's by design. The one-month-novel was a writing experiment and they never intended to actually have others read it. Other times, people have the best intentions of editing and polishing over the next year, but real life intrudes. It's one thing to devote a month to an experiment. It's something else to devote an entire year.
- Unleash the damn thing on an unsuspecting world at the end of November.
Choice #4 is fool-hardy. Nobody I know plans on doing this. Except for me, of course.
Why? Because I promised the following:
But, whatever steaming pile of manure exists at the end of the month, I will post here. I'll even post an ePub version, for your eReader. This I swear!
And my word is my bond! Sometimes. Today it is.
So, later today, I'll post the novella. I need to slap a Creative Commons license on it first, then dump it out to PDF, ePub, and Mobi formats.
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