Kicked in the nuts -- and it was good!

So I sent off my book to someone I trusted. She read the whole thing. Yay! The first person besides Loving Wife (who saw it still steaming and dripping ink off the printer) to read my book.

How'd she like it? She tore that MFer apart and slapped me upside the head with its bloody entrails.

Which is EXACTLY why I sent it to her.

Getting kicked in the nuts about something you have obsessed over for half a year isn't the most pleasant feeling in the world and the very first thing I thought when I read her email was along the lines of 'worthless, bloody hack'. And, indeed, I may be a worthless bloody hack, but within moments of reading her comments the first time through, I also knew she had hit upon those things that weren't sitting quite right but I couldn't figure out what was wrong.

The wrong character is the primary villain? Crap
It sounds like cheap fan fiction of a favorite author? Shit (but Yay for having someone compare me to Jim Butcher!)
Your world building is held together with spit and toilet tissue? Dammit.

But quite honestly, I am grateful. More than grateful, I am relieved. I am relieved that while what she pointed out makes for a lot of work, I immediately agreed with her assessment once it was laid out for me.

So, as is often the phrase in the writing world, I am off to kill my darlings. Because DEATH FOOF is going to get a major overhaul. And that is a good thing.

It's the best sort of kick in the nuts a guy can get.

NaNoWriMo - What the what?

Today marks the start of NaNoWriMo. For the uninitiated, it stands for National Novel Writing Month. Without boring the non-writers out there, it is basically a group effort designed to give writers a nudge/boost/smack in the ass to sit down and just write.

The goal is to write 50k words, roughly the equivalent to 1/2-3/4 of a full novel. Dividing that over 30 days, it's about 1666 words per day. Now, this doesn't seem that much, right? After all, you remember the 500 word essays you wrote in high school and you churned those out on the bus on your way to school.

Well, Aspiring Author is here to tell you that sitting down and writing a little over 1500 words a day can be really hard if you don't have a plan. It's easy enough to churn out writing in discrete chunks-- I am vomiting out a little over 325 words for this blog post right now -- when that writing has a specific purpose. But it is much more difficult to write those words when they are just links in a chain that has to stretch from point A to point B and not become hopelessly tangled like those seventeen year old strings of Christmas lights you are about to break out.

Yours truly will not be participating in NaNoWriMo per se. However, I have decided to do so in spirit. I will not be shooting towards a specific word count goal, but I will be spending the month of November writing the sequel to DEATH FOOF. Yes, that was a 'title reveal' I just did there. Congrats on becoming one of the first to know the name of my first book.

The sequel has been plotted, and has a working title of THE UNDEAD DEAD. So, to all my writing friends out there in interwebland, good luck on NaNoWriMo. Consider this another nudge or boost to get you to write.

If you want a smack in the ass, I will have to ask permission from Loving Wife first.

Cheers.

AA