Closing In: an update on All Right
Update Posted: 603 words
Well, November ends in 4 days (four days!). And that’s counting today, to boot! No, I’m not in panic mode — why should you ask? NaNo has been fantastic-ish. I may or may not be putting off writing the ending, but that’s none of your business! First, an update:
The Status Update
All Right is sitting at 42,903 words. That seems like a really big number, but there’s still so much to be done. As you might guess, I’m not going to hit 50,000 words in November (but that’s OK — the book doesn’t need to be that long). I have about 2,000 more words to produce, and about a week to get there.
Writing (nearly) every day for an entire month has been exhilarating and exhausting at the same time. I have been immersed in this world, and it’s worked: behold, here is a manuscript.
It’s only the second time in my life I’ve actually gotten this far on a story, and it’s the only time I’ve ever gotten this close to “The End” with a story that I whole-heartedly believe in.
All Right is pretty special. The themes and stories inside are fiction, and yet deeply personal. I’ve never written a story with this much of myself inside. But at the same time, I’m also sick of it. I’m sick of the slog of actually sitting down and producing every single day, vomiting out emotions and feelings that aren’t really my own onto a blank, mocking page.
And, I should check myself here. The month’s not over. I have two more chapters to push out, and then some minor revisions if there’s time. Huge themes are only now beginning to come into focus, and I read over hastily-composed scenes and catch only a glimpse of what I was intending to communicate. This book has been demanding to write, and now I’m almost done. I intend to finish out November strong: to write the last two chapters, dot a few i’s, and take a long nap.
The Next Few Months
So what’s next?
I’m going to put All Right on the shelf until February. I’m going to let the raw, imperfect writing age for a little bit, and I’m going to come back to it all when Jacob, Jessica, and Andy are not in my head as vividly as they are now. It’ll get edited, run over and over for tightness, coherence, and clarity. I know some scenes need to be blown up, others need to be expanded, and still others need to be chopped. I’m sure there’s at least one scene I love right now that won’t make it into the final book. Finally, I hope to publish All Right; yeah, we’ll see how that goes.
In the meantime, I’ll be taking the month of December to plot out a story that’s even older than All Right: Fullblood. Like All Right, Fullblood has a partial first draft and some disconnected plot ideas floating around, but has never been finished. I’m going to take the month of December to dive back into that world and plan my plot.
Then, in January I’ll be taking a crack at JanNoWriMo, which is definitely not something I just made up! It’s nothing formal, but it’ll help me with the goal of producing a complete first draft of Fullblood. I’ll revisit All Right after that’s done — in February.
I’m excited to share world-building ideas and snippets from Fullblood over the next two months. I’m even more excited to return to All Right in the spring, and hopefully, pursue publication. 2019 better look out.