Novel Writing: A Summation in Praise of Long Books
Another NaNoWriMo has come and gone, with mixed results for me. I won, in that I wrote more than 50,000 words. But I didn’t come close to the target of twice that, which is what I was aiming for. In the past, my pace tended to pick up as the month ended; this time around a bad cold hampered my progress, and I didn’t even crack 60,000.
Still, there’s a sense in which I think I accomplished what I was after this month. I took an idea, or a collection of ideas, and started giving it form as an actual story. I wrote enough to gain a sense of the thing; how it’d be shaped, what sort of themes would be prominent, what kind of voice I’d use to tell the tale.
Perhaps the main point is that I learned what the scale of it would be. I started with the notion that I’d be writing two books, totalling maybe a bit more than 100,000 words; I know now that I’m working on a four-volume story, probably with a word count of between 300,000 and 400,000 words.
There’s an 
Did you know that there are awards for book trailers? They’re called “The Moby Awards” and you can check the most recent winners (and losers) 
Okay, not a cheery thought, but you aren’t reading Martha Stewart’s Living as you well know.
Only a few months ago, I would never have believed that I would end up writing two convention reports within the space of a month. Yet here I am bringing you news of