Be Your Own Editor

A quick (and overdue) congrats to my friend W, who did, in fact, complete her National Novel Writing Month word-count goal in November. Yay! Is it a finished, publishable work? No. But she’s feeling good about producing some material she can work with, whether it becomes a novel or a few stories or whatever. You rock, W.

As for myself, I am officially designating January “National Chapter-Writing Month,” and I plan to complete the first chapter of my own novel by month’s end. I wrote several chapters during the “Finish a Draft of Your Novel in Three Months” class I took last summer, but, well, they sucked and need to be completely rewritten. Wish me luck! I’ll need it, especially since my Christmas stocking was filled with Barnes & Noble gift cards, so it’ll be hard not to spend the whole month reading.

By the way, sorry I’ve been lax in answering reader questions recently… I’ll get caught up soon, I promise!

If you read this website regularly, you know few things annoy me more in writing than unnecessary words that add no meaning to a sentence (see previous posts on “would,” “that,” etc.). I’m currently reading a recently published novel and have recognized in it the overuse of a major offender in this category: “actually.”

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