No NaNoWriMo

November is National Novel Writing Month. I've never participated, though I drafted River of Webs (my new working title for A Web of Every Color) in my own personal novel writing month. I followed the same guidelines as NaNoWriMo, writing 50,000 words in 30 days, I just did it during a September. I've never been at a point of drafting when November hit.

I will need to redraft Beyond the Midnight Mountain. But I haven't nailed down all the plot points yet. After the number of years and drafts I've devoted to it already, when I start over from near scratch, I want to get it as right as I can. Maybe December of January.

In the meantime, I've spent a lot of months not writing, and then blasted through the rest of my current draft of A Web of Every Color. I'm now calling it River of Webs. I personally like the first title better, and even have an image in my head of clever cover art, but the second has better potential for match sequel titles. Its current draft has taken a while despite the story being pretty well nailed down on the first go, because I decided the person and tense were wrong. I originally wrote it in first person/present tense because I didn't want to box myself into third/past--and because me/now perfectly reflected the narrator Simi. But it turns out first/present isn't how I write my best fiction.  It ended up too much in the character's head, too  stream-of-consciousness. Plus Simi's sarcastic, uneducated narrator voice--which I loved--just wasn't the right voice for the more articulate or descriptive parts of the narration.

So I changed it to third/past. I changed each instance in the narration of I, me, my, myself, we, us, our, and ours. I changed each instance of here and now that I could without losing clarity (because I hate past tense narration that still uses here/now). I changed the tense of every verb. Sometimes I had to change "she" to a name because it was no longer clear whether it referred to another character or Simi herself. Sometimes I rearranged whole sentences because they no longer read smoothly. Sometimes I rewrote or cut sentences because they no longer worked without Simi's voice saying them.

I stalled for several months I was also trying to research things for Simi to see when she went to a new location, and also decide a few world building details. Once I got through that chapter though, I sailed through the rest in a couple weeks. So now that that's done, I'm going back through one more time to fix minor time/geography details I still haven't pinned down. Then it's off to an alpha reader.