Noveling

          This month, I'm embarking (and have been embarking) on a month-long quest to write a 50,000-word novel, through Camp NaNo. This is the first time that I have written a novel, and I'm excited. My novel is about a girl named Alyssa Taylor, who moves to Columbus, Ohio because of her mother's new job. She meets several new classmates, and they begin working on the Newspaper Project. As it slowly unravels, she quickly finds out that life is more complex than it may seem. It is a literary novel, meaning that it currently has little-to-no plot and dialogue, but I have got the characters down. I'm trying to give it more dialogue, and I have more of a plot now, so that's good. As I have experienced 27 days thus far of crazy noveling, character-building, and reading blogs about noveling, I have wisdom to share with you. 
Prepare to be enlightened.

     What I have learned from Camp NaNo*:
- I procrastinate badly
- use whatever you've got
- don't discriminate against bad ideas
- being an author is way harder than it seems
- you should stock up on cookies and other sugar-filled objects
- Write or Die is the way to go
- it’s way harder to be consistently witty in a book than in real life

* It would be cool if that made an acronym about writing, but it doesn’t, unless IUDBYWI is some type of analyzing device


                                        The Plan for my Novel

     After I finish my novel in the next few days (well, technically, the first draft), then I will edit it like crazy and remove a lot of the monologues which I have inserted solely for their word-usage. I’m not looking forward to that, but I will do that. Once I don’t cringe at the thought of other people reading my heartfelt opus, then I may give it to some of my friends as beta readers, so they would give me feedback (not that I’ve found anyone for that job [who agreed to it], yet). After getting their feedback, if they give me feedback, I will ignore about half of it, because I don’t like constructive criticism. I will act sullen and mope about the house, thinking about how they ‘obviously didn’t understand what I meant by that phrase’ (or something to that effect), for several days, and then I might consider their feedback. I will make some of those changes, and then I will go over my story again, making my changes as needed. After I’m completely satisfied with that, I will look into Kindle Direct Publishing, and try to publish it for free as a Kindle book this summer, because I simply love strangers harshly judging my writing (yes, you’re right; I could stop writing stuff and putting it on the internet for others to judge mercilessly, but that would take all of the pain out of it, and who really wants that? That’s right, nobody).