All NaNo's Eve

237/265 pages

That is where I am leaving The Tale of Hengist and Undine tonight. Over the past year or so I've been making red marks on what I had labeled the penultimate draft of the novel. Over the past few months, I've been taking those marks, making other changes as they come to me, and turning the penultimate draft into the ultimate draft.

The educational takeaway from this is that making changes on paper and then typing those same changes into a Word document is inefficient, maybe. I hadn't really anticipated how many hours of work it was to apply all of my changes even without thinking about them. So I really thought this step would be the easiest one. And maybe it has been the easiest--I don't really remember the previous steps clearly enough to compare them--but it hasn't been as negligible an effort as I had expected.

The practical takeaway from this is that I'm going into NaNoWriMo this year with some work to do on Hengist that I really don't want to put off until December. I was actually in almost the same situation last year. Which invites the question: why didn't I learn not to do this?

Ah well.

So in 2007 I approached NaNoWriMo with a rather casual approach toward plot, theme, etc. The result was, almost inexplicably, a three-year project with the end-goal of getting a decent novel published. So I'm apparently going at it from the same angle this time.

This year's NaNo is called This Silver Mask. I should point out that this is a very working title. I'm not at all certain that there will be a mask of any kind. If no mask develops, then of course I will have to make some changes to the title. But I'm not going to worry about the mask for now. I'm going to see about having a plot.

Good luck to everyone else who's trying this.