Keeping Track

November 1, 2007

I hear November is typically the month that there's this thing about writing a novel in 30 days. I was going to look it up, it's called something like NaMaMo or NaNoMo or something (feel free to remind me), but I was into my dashboard here and didn't feel like stopping because... well, read on.

I just mentioned a couple days ago about avoidance behavior, how I was working on too many projects at once. I mentioned that my agent liked what I had done on CHINA FIRE. So it seemed logical to really kick butt on it.

But in a discussion with her about a couple of my other projects, I mentioned the political thriller and sent her what I'd done to-date, which was about 70 pages or so. She got back to me in a couple days (yesterday, primarily) to say she loved it, but I needed to kill the prologue and she had an editor in mind who loved that kind of thing.

There's a lot more to this, but I asked her to hold off a bit so I could cut the prologue (I was debating doing it anyway), get the length up to 100 pages or so, and brush up the rest of the manuscript. So we made a deal, which I won't go into here, and that's what I'm going to do.

I also want to get a big chunk of CHINA FIRE done, preferably getting a draft completed before January 1, 2008.

So, if not in the actuality of NaNoMo, but in the spirit of, I'm going to alert you to my daily word counts on these two projects. The other project we'll call HM.

So, 10/31/07

HM: 1100 words (approximately)

CF: 0 (yeah, bummer. But I hit a point where I needed to do some research).

Cheers,

Mark Terry