Day 25: 42,083 words
One of my two first-draft beta testers left me a message on our Scrabulous game that she was enjoying the few chapters I sent her a while back. I haven’t heard from the other one, but it’s been a holiday week, and I’m sure people had more important things to worry about than reading.
I am having a great time writing this novel, and I’m on track to hit 50K this week. I’m not sure if my story will conveniently end at 50K or whether I will have to keep writing a day or two longer; it depends on what happens to my main character during the mission team’s debrief at the safari park.
The story has been tremendously cathartic for me; I told a co-worker last week that it’s making me intensely “homesick” for another Africa trip. Like my 2004 story, which was also sort of cathartic, I’m not sure if this one will turn out to be marketable or not. I meant for the novel to draw a lot on my real-life experiences, and I think they’ve added some nice detail, but I’m not sure the basic plot per se is going to turn out to be strong enough to appeal to a general audience. There’s also a matter of tone; it may be too frank in some places for the Christian fiction market, but too religious for the general fiction market. Then again, maybe I’m overthinking things and should just trust that people will be able to enjoy the manuscript for what it is.
If I don’t find the manuscript to be marketable in the traditional sense, I could always set it up and offer it on CafePress or some similar service as a publish-on-demand product.
Today, with a little extra time, I not only wrote from the bottom of the story but went back and fixed a couple of minor plot holes, and moved one passage that I had written in the past day or two to a place earlier in the novel where it made more sense.
When I get done with this NaNoWriMo draft, I’ll probably set it aside for a few weeks and pick it back up after Christmas or after the first of the year. There’s some major editing that will need to be done with it. There are several characters that have been poorly developed, and I need to give them more dialogue and more business.
I also need to look at the structure of the novel. As I’ve blogged before, a relatively large chunk of the novel is given to travel and in-country training before they actually begin their work in Kenya. This was intentional; it’s part of the point of the novel to show how these preliminary experiences are all part of the trip. But will the reader become impatient?
Anyway, now is not the time to answer those questions. My concern now is writing 1,667 words a day for the next five days.
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Jennifer
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