November: NaNoWriMo and More

It's been almost a week since my last post, a couple of weeks since releasing The Lost Book of Anggird, and I'm still a little ways out from my next major release, which will be Sarya's Song. So how am I entertaining myself (and trying to stay out of trouble) in the meantime?

First of all, it's November, which means National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo, or just NaNo). Last year I wrote the draft of Sarya's Song (finally finishing it after a number of false starts), but this year I've returned to my tradition of pounding out a fanfiction during November. I got off to a good start, then took a few days off to finish the draft of Book 6 of Daughter of the Wildings, then just couldn't get motivated to work on the novel I was doing for NaNo. So on Nov. 8, I decided to set aside the novel I'd started and work on an idea I'd been toying with for a few years. Starting over again from zero words more than a week into November means a lot of catching up to do. I set a minimum quota of 2500 words a day, and I'm almost caught up. Things are looking good for my 5th win in a row! (Note for those unfamiliar with NaNoWriMo, the object is to write 50,000 words of a novel during the month of November. It's a self-challenge rather than a contest where you're competing against other people, and everyone who verifies that they wrote 50,000 words or more is a winner.)

Also, as I mentioned, I finished the 6th book of Daughter of the Wildings, which means that the whole series now exists in complete form. The whole series is printed out and sitting in a very large binder, resting for a while until I'm ready to start the revision. So, for those of you who hate waiting years between books of a series, and who wonder if a slow-publishing series is ever going to be finished at all, take heart - Daughter of the Wildings is complete, if still something of a mess. I'm even giving my family instructions that should something happen to prevent me from editing and publishing the whole thing, they're to just put whatever hasn't been published yet online. Not that I plan on anything happening to me, but you never know. (My husband is a wills and estate planning lawyer. That sort of thing kind of rubs off on you when you live with it.)

A couple of stories I wrote last March during my pre-Camp NaNo challenge have still been waiting around to be edited. "The Tale of Haveshi Yellowcrow" and "The Tale of Latan the Scholar" (original titles, I know) are linked together and are also loosely related to Chosen of Azara; Haveshi and Latan are mentioned in passing (and not by name) in the novel. I decided it's time to get these fixed up and published, so I'm working on the revision of those after I finish my NaNo quota each day. With some luck and a lot of hard work, they should be ready in a week or so. I'm thinking I'll post them on the site for free for a short time, then put them in the Kindle Select program for 90 days.

I'll start on the next revision of Sarya's Song once I'm done with the Haveshi and Latan stories.

Finally, The Lost Book of Anggird has been getting some very nice reviews. I installed the Goodreads reviews widget for it on the book page, so you can read the complete reviews there, or check out highlights on the Lost Book reviews page.

Back to work!

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