Hello, writers. Many thanks to the redoubtable mettle fatigue for hosting Write On! last week. On October 4, Write On! will be hosted by dconrad.
(I’ll be presenting at a Highlights Foundation workshop again. I highly recommend these workshops for anyone that’s interested in writing kidlit. They’re a bit expensive, but there are scholarships available.)
As I look at that date I realize NaNoWriMo is almost upon us again. As usual, we’ll do our own version here on WO!; you can make your goal 50k words, or more, or less, or you can have a revision goal, or a querying goal, or an organization goal… whatever you want to challenge yourself to do.
And if there’s interest, we’ll also do Da(ily)Ko(s)WriMo again in January, a month some folks find more convenient for writing than November.
I just had a conversation with my agent yesterday about a novel manuscript that I started back in March of 2017. In December she sent me a long edit letter about it, and it took me until last month to finish those edits, as I’ve spent a lot of time caregiving and recovering from caregiving this year. Anyway, long story short, she just sent me another edit letter.
After some thinking I told her I don’t think I’ll do the edits. I think it may be time to set the manuscript aside. Another revision would take another nine months, and I’m already at the point of hating the thing, part two.
The first episode of “hating the thing” usually comes at around ¾ of the way through the first draft. At that point, hating it means I’m nearly done.
But now, I hate it with ennui. Every word has had to fight for its right to remain. I have no further thoughts on whether each word should be there or not. If the thing isn’t good enough now, I have no will or desire to waste most of a year making it good enough. I’ll write something else instead.
What about you? How do you decide when it’s time to quit?
Since the preceding doesn’t lend itself to a tonight’s challenge:
Write 150 words based on these two words randomly selected from the dictionary:
pittance
corner
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