Fast Fiction

Yes, it’s March and if you haven’t checked the calendar, it’s National Novel Editing Month.

Of course, I can’t do anything normally. I’m not planning on editing, because that implies that I have a “draft” of my novel that’s worthy of polish. I don’t have something rough, I have something that’s raw.

I’m planning a chapter-by-chapter rewrite. I’m just sitting down with print out and retyping it. My laziness will be a guide - if I don’t feel like typing it, it’s probably not good enough to be in the novel. If I can reword it to be more concise, you can be damn sure I will.

The Exchange, for those of you who joined recently, is the story of a teen girl who was raised by her mother and grandmother. When she’s in a car accident, her mother tries to track down her biological father. She’s not able to find him, but seeks help from a postmaster in the man’s tiny rural hometown. The postmaster takes pity on the little girl in the hospital and sends her flowers, signing her father’s name. Of course the girl writes a thank you note when she recovers and they begin corresponding. For years. Finally she comes to town in search of her father and finds this postmast, who is only a few years older than her and they strike up a friendship as the postmaster seeks to thwart her efforts to actually meet her father.

It needs work and what I had originally envisioned was that the bulk of the novel would simply be the exchange of letters between the two people as the girl grew up. She would start at 13 or 14 and eventually come looking for her father about five years later. I think the pretense of letters has got to go. I don’t think there’s any compelling reason that I can draft that they wouldn’t email each other, if not from the beginning, eventually the communication would become more immediate.

So it’s a lot to do. And of course it’s the second of the month and I haven’t started yet. The rules for NaNoEdMo are much more strict (well, for me) since they require 50 hours of work. And I don’t usually take that long to write it.