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A lesson learned; or, an exercise in paranoid obsessive-compulsion
posted at 8:23 PM  
Eric Burns reminded me today that National Novel Writing Month is coming. (NaNoWriMo, a truncation worthy of the Japanese language!)
So. Should I do it?
I am really, really upset over losing what little I wrote about Tilya and the Mazarins. I mean, there is an infinitesimal chance that the demo guys will rake through the rubble and pluck out my hard drive, and that my writing will still be on it. But ultimately, it's probably best to just accept that it's lost. And the thing is, it didn't have to be.
I was publishing the book online. It was readily available. It could have been Google-cached, or stored on the Internet Archive.
But I got skittish. I didn't want the blog to be the "first publication" of the book, because I "might" try to get it published, and people familiar with the publishing world indicated that publishers don't like sloppy seconds.
In other words, I wanted to protect the publishing rights for something I hadn't even written yet.
There's a cliche for that sort of thing, you know. It involves chickens.
If I'd left it public, I'd still have it. And you know, just because I've "published" it doesn't mean a publisher won't still be interested. There are many people who've been published because of their blogs.
What all this is boiling down to is: should I once again attempt a serious writing project, I will do it publicly, on a blog. Rather than bank on something that may or may not happen in the distant future, I will share my work immediately, and get feedback, and ensure that if this house burns down with all my stuff in it, at least what I've written will survive.
Comments
Since I've been writing my first book (scholarly, not fiction), I've learned quite a lot about how to make the process work -- for me, but I thought I'd share.
When I started, I measured progress in pages. I shot for 1.5 single-spaced pages per day, five days per week, which is pretty much the rate that every scholar shoots for (roughly 600 words per day/3000 per week). Some days you're working on a section that you know well or are passionate about, and you get 3 pages. Some days you are frustrated and don't really care and you get .5 pages, if you're lucky. But at the end of the month, I shoot for 30 single-spaced pages. And with the exception of one month, I hit that goal. With edits and changes in argument from peer reviews of chapters, I've lost about 15 to 20 percent of what I've written each month.
However, about a month ago, I moved away from the page metric. Why? Because 'thought' doesn't happen or organize itself in pages. I was shooting for an entirely arbitrary goal each day. I started moving towards paragraphs as the basic unit of my writing. Because paragraphs are the basic unit of the expression of ideas.
It has been a quite liberating switch. I don't worry about writing in a linear fashion, which I had to do when I wrote by the page. With the paragraph, if I finish one on one topic, I can switch topics entirely. I aim for completing six paragraphs per day.
True, all these paragraphs have to be put back together again, but it's so easy with a word processor, and it actually helps me find holes in my argument or weaknesses in my transitions.
I would, however, suggest that you guard your intellectual property. You might write it in a blog, but I wouldn't make the blog public, at least not to a general audience. Really, truly, it would be so easy for someone to take your work, especially if you've got one of those brilliant plot twists that's a jaw-dropper, and make it 'their own'. Protect your work and ideas. Even I have to do this, even though I don't think anyone would put in the massive amounts of work it would take to get to know the source materials I'm working with, but because I'm working on a project that's provocative and people are talking about -- you never know. It's just not worth the risk. I don't even publish where the archives are that I take my materials from. Once the book is published (and I've already got the publisher), I'll reveal all. Until then -- nothing.
Sweetie, don't "could've/would've/should've" yourself to death, know how it felt to be writing that piece (and how much I hung on it, at least, on a daily basis, 'til you'd throw another bit out, like food to a hungry dog :P!!) remember that experience. and blend it with the fact that in ONE year, you've had SO MUCH to happen, and are definitely, in ways, a different person than when you started that one; embrace the fact that you're writing with a clean slate, don't let it hinder you. Hmmm, that may seem kind of callous, perhaps, but if you THINK about it from the flip side, you've got the potential to write ANYTHING, even if nothing may please you more than to make that "anything" a continuation of what you'd started last year.
Write good things, my Hea Hea, I'm waiting to read them. Or at least hear you talk about how the whole writing process is coming along.. :P
I can't wait to read it!!!
It's easy enough to just e-mail yourself the story as you go along and make changes. Or e-mail it to people like me that can just let it sit on their computers for you just in case. You can't blame yourself for what happened to your writing, because what happened was completely unpredictable.
Point is, you can figure out ways to keep other copies of your work in places other than on your computer. Hell, you could just stick it on your site in a zip file somewhere, with no true link to access it. Or you could start up a free account on angelfire or what have you, and just dump the files there and never tell a soul.
Two words: Gmail
>_>
<_<
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