Under a Gibbous Moon

It finally arrived in the mail. Wait, I should probably go back a step.

Everyone who completed their NaNoWriMo novel back in November was given a free print copy by createspace.com (Amazon’s publishing arm). I finally got around to doing the final edit and submitting it to printed. The process was much faster than the 27 March date they gave me, but I’m not complaining.

Anyway, here it is:

The cover, so glossy!

The spine, a full 233 pages thick

Even though its not really “published” it is still neat to be able to physically hold a book that I wrote. It shall have a revered and holy place on my book shelf.

OK, I’m done now.

Finally, after a long, long, long, long, long time, I have finished the final edit of my 2009 National Novel Writing Month Novel. There is one joy to going back and editing something long after the fact, you realize exactly how much it stinks.

Truly, though, that was the point of the exercise. Well, not so much to write a crappy novel as to just write one at all. I, like many others, get caught up in whether or not the writing or the plot and whatnot is good enough that we never actually getting around to writing anything.

It’s not the worst thing that I’ve ever read but it’ll never be a classic. So here, for your enjoyment, is my novel.

Last night, I finally managed to break through the 50K barrier. For my efforts I got that nifty little badge to place on my blog. A bit gaudy but it won’t stay up there forever.

Despite the win, my novel is still not done yet. I have yet to finish the first edit. Then after that, it will need more further polishing before I will consider it done, maybe by the end of December. After I am satisfied with it I will be putting it up here as a CC licensed download.

Now that I’m not spending all my time on it, I can finally catch up on current events and actually do some more blogging.

Well the novel is finished. At least it is finished in the sense that I have reached “The End” (and no, I did not actually write that). Unfortunately I am at 44,778 words.

What this means is that I now have some serious padding to do. I mean editing, yes editing I like the sound of that better. As long as I can “edit” another 350 words or so into each scene I should be home free. And with a mere 5 days left to write. So much for sleeping.

I’ve put in a huge push on my novel in the last two days. I had fallen far behind to to my accident. In the last 48 hours I’ve written 7,824 words more words. This brings me to a grand total of 43,037 words. I have less than 7K words left until I reach the 50K word mark.

This would not be a problem except that I have exactly ONE (1) chapter left to write. Not only is it just one measly chapter but it is only one scene. It is the epilogue. Now the prologue for the novel clocked it at just slightly over 1K words so I don’t think that there is any way to stretch this out to 7K. I would say at best I might get 2K words out of it leaving me with a finished novel somewhere around 45K words.

At that point I’m going to have to figure out what I’m going to do next. Do I go back an add in additional scenes? Expand upon what I have already written?

At the very least, I will finish the epilogue tomorrow which will leave me with at least 5 days to figure it out. I feel at least moderately confident that I will be able to scrape together something.