Psychologically speaking, it’s hard to notice the absence of something–or so I’ve read.  All the same, you may have noticed that I did not post yesterday, November 1st, about National Novel Writing Month.  I’ve completed NaNoWriMo six times, including the past four years.  It’s always a lot of fun, and I’ve achieved some big writing goals.  But NaNo doesn’t fit into my writing plans this year.

I’ve been deep in revisions for my Phantom of the Opera retelling for most of the year.  I finished Book One just in the past month.  My goal was to get Book Two to beta-readers by the end of the year.  Considering Book One took much longer than I expected, that may be a lofty goal…but I’m still hopeful!

And so I’m doing my own writing goal this November.  It doesn’t make sense to track words, because revisions don’t quite work that way, so instead I want to track time.  From all those past NaNos, I’ve learned that I can do about 400 words in a 15-minute writing sprint.  Multiplying it all out, 50,000 words for NaNo takes me about an hour a day, or 30 hours in November.

My life is pretty hectic at the moment, so I’m not trying to commit to 30 hours of revising–but I do intend to do 15 hours of revising, or about half-an-hour a day.  If it goes well in November, I’ll try it again in December.

I don’t really know how far that will get me in revising–because I’ve never done this before!  But I do know that writing goals tend to be attainable if I set them, and that the muse tends to work things out.  When I set out to finish my Phantom trilogy for NaNoWriMo, with literally no idea how much of it was left, I finished it in 50,009 words–no joke!  So we’ll see if it turns out that Book Two needs thirty hours of revision.

I’ll keep posting Writing Wednesday updates, and we’ll see how this goes!