Most writers are familiar with National Novel Writing Month. I say "most" because a writing friend of mine hadn't, but he's Canadian and I'm pretty sure I've worked around a Canadian long enough to get away with the phrase "Those wacky Canadians!" In a nutshell the rules are that you write a novel in the span of a month. Depending on the total word count you want to achieve depends on the number of words you have to type each day. Frankly I think Novella Month would be more achievable, but people have made some pretty good books under such time constraints.
I don't need that though, you know what I need? National Novel Editing Month.
Yes, I manage to procrastinate editing by more writing. I've written an entire manuscript to procrastinate editing the previous one, and you know what happened? I finished it. Now I have two written manuscripts in which neither have been edited.
Editing goes faster though, since the words are already down. You make a few tweaks here and there, maybe add a whole new scene, but it flies right by compared to writing from scratch. Right now The Crystal Witch clocks in at just over 38,000 words, a novella. Luckily the ebook market is more flexible about shorter stories. So, even if I edited a dismal 1,000 words a night (which is the goal I have each night when writing) I would still have it finished in a little more than a month.
More importantly though, Dusted came out all the way back in June 2012, and I don't want to pass the three year mark without publishing something else. What motivated me the most were two things, two authors really.
The first was Kristen Britain, she wrote a book called Green Rider, I already talked about it here, but the focus is how long it took her to write more books in the series. It wasn't that she was busy with other books like some authors, but it must have been some combination of a busy schedule and wanting to perfect it before release. Still, I dutifully read books 1-3, bought book 4 and have never read it (nor, do I think, I will), and now book 5 is out and I'm not even bothering. It took too long for the author between books, and it has taken her literally decades to get to things that were being foreshadowed in the first few books. Yes, you can always go back and reread books, but there are always new authors and stories coming along with promises delivered faster.
Second, and more relevant, is S.D. Tower. Who in the heck is S.D. Tower? This is an author who wrote a halfway decent book ("halfway decent" meaning I read it back in 2003) called The Assassins of Tamurin and then never wrote anything again. A "one hit wonder" except remove "hit"....and "wonder" too I guess.
Point is, I don't want to be like the first author, but I really don't want to be like the second.
So those are my motivations to edit. It won't be pretty and it won't be perfect, and I can't make any promises that I'll have something before the end of 2014, but I'll be working on it.
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