NoNoWriMo

Well, I completed the National Novel Writing Month program, although I have not completed my project. I hit the goal of 50,000 words on November 20 and had 70,253 on November 30. I have continued writing and when I quit writing earlier this morning (December 1) I had 72,360 words. In pages formatted like my three published books, that is 342 pages. 

I have been using this process to write my memoirs, so I consider it cheating because it is not totally fiction. On the other hand, memoirs tend not to be totally non-fiction, so it is a gray area at best. 

In the story-thus-far, I am 24 years old. If I were to keep going at this rate, the final product would run about a thousand pages. No one needs to read that many pages of my life. It would take too much time away from their own life!

Of course, this is an unedited draft. Also I have no intention of publishing this. I have shared parts of it with a couple of interested friends, but this is not something designed for general circulation. Mark Twain points out that no one can be totally honest, no matter how hard they try, with their own life story. I agree with that, but I have tried to be as honest as I could.

Anyway, I am just reporting in that I accomplished this short term goal. I have learned a lot about just-keep-writing, which is the most important point of this activity. Now I have to turn that to the things I do want to publish.

On another note, I heard this week from the editor for the Carmelites. She had two good bits of news. First, the timelines I worked on were fine and I can expect payment for those soon. Second, she asked me to do a first-read-light-edit of a manuscript she had just received. This is a translation of an autobiographical text by Jerome Gracian, who is a character in my mystery novel and the author of the Treatise on Melancholy that makes up the bulk of one of my other publications.  

(Tom designed that cover, using an old drawing of Gratian. BTW, his name is spelled Gracian in Spanish and both Gracian and Gratian in English. The translator, editor and I all agree to use the Spanish spelling in this new work and in all future volumes from ICS Publications.)

I hope to receive that in the mail next week, and that should keep me busy for a while. I am not sure how long the manuscript will be, but the published Spanish edition runs to almost 400 pages. Yipes!