I found this little "blog rating" tool on Badger's site. Clearly I have not been doing my job.
What's new? Still plinking at my India novel, preparing to send it to my agent, for whom it will, I hope, be a welcome surprise. I've been mentioning it to her every few months for the last year and she may have permanently put it on the back burner of her expectations, so I hope she'll enjoy getting it.
Then I'm going to start a new project pronto-tonto. The publisher of my books of sex stories asked me earlier this year to submit a proposal for a novel, and I'm just about to sign a contract (one reason my agent has not completely forgotten me). I'll be talking more about this book in the next few months, but the operative thing is that the deadline is the first of the year. Yes, I have to write a whole novel of at least 200 pages in six months.
That shouldn't be too horribly challenging, because genre writers do it all the time. In fact, many writers of romance or crime books, both fiction and non-fiction, polish off three or four books a year. They would not be impressed with the deadline of 200 pages in 6 months. So I'm not going to complain.
Still, it should be interesting. My India novel (I'm still shilly-shallying about the title, but for now it is Dear Prudence), started as a NaNo -- a project for National Novel Writing Month. That's where you're supposed to churn out 50,000 words in the month of November. And I did get a good start -- in November, 2004. I managed to do about 20,000 words that month, but then it took me two years to work out the rest of the book, the first draft of which I finished on 28 December 2006.
I did, however, keep almost all of those first 20,000 words, which makes me think that it's not a bad idea to give people an excuse to start a novel with an artificial deadline, just to see what they turn out. But it really should be called National Novel Starting Month, because only Georges Simenon could write a novel in less than a month.
But the first of the year is now a real, not arbitrary deadline for me. I'll let you know how it goes.
2 comments:
Good luck, Mark! I'm so glad you've so busy with all the writing.
I BEGAN writing my novel Home Products in the summer of 2003, a few weeks before my wife gave birth to our first child.
But even before I began work on the book I bought a black hardcover sketchbook. In its pages, I started writing down whatever I liked in what I happened to be reading. Among the earliest journal entries is the opening line of a review that had appeared, in the New York Times, of the film "The Hours". This was also the opening line of a novel by Virginia Woolf. I cut it out and pasted it in my journal. "Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself."
There are no notes around that neatly cut out quote but I can imagine why it had appealed to a first-time novelist. You read Woolf's line and are suddenly aware of the brisk entry into a fully-formed world. No fussing around with irrelevant detail and back-story. And I began to write various opening lines.
Read more How to write a Novel
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