Eric Burns reminded me today that National Novel Writing Month is coming. (NaNoWriMo, a truncation worthy of the Japanese language!)
So. Should I do it?
I am really, really upset over losing what little I wrote about Tilya and the Mazarins. I mean, there is an infinitesimal chance that the demo guys will rake through the rubble and pluck out my hard drive, and that my writing will still be on it. But ultimately, it's probably best to just accept that it's lost. And the thing is, it didn't have to be.
I was publishing the book online. It was readily available. It could have been Google-cached, or stored on the Internet Archive.
But I got skittish. I didn't want the blog to be the "first publication" of the book, because I "might" try to get it published, and people familiar with the publishing world indicated that publishers don't like sloppy seconds.
In other words, I wanted to protect the publishing rights for something I hadn't even written yet.
There's a cliche for that sort of thing, you know. It involves chickens.
If I'd left it public, I'd still have it. And you know, just because I've "published" it doesn't mean a publisher won't still be interested. There are many people who've been published because of their blogs.
What all this is boiling down to is: should I once again attempt a serious writing project, I will do it publicly, on a blog. Rather than bank on something that may or may not happen in the distant future, I will share my work immediately, and get feedback, and ensure that if this house burns down with all my stuff in it, at least what I've written will survive.
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4 comments:
Sweetie, don't "could've/would've/should've" yourself to death, know how it felt to be writing that piece (and how much I hung on it, at least, on a daily basis, 'til you'd throw another bit out, like food to a hungry dog :P!!) remember that experience. and blend it with the fact that in ONE year, you've had SO MUCH to happen, and are definitely, in ways, a different person than when you started that one; embrace the fact that you're writing with a clean slate, don't let it hinder you. Hmmm, that may seem kind of callous, perhaps, but if you THINK about it from the flip side, you've got the potential to write ANYTHING, even if nothing may please you more than to make that "anything" a continuation of what you'd started last year.
Write good things, my Hea Hea, I'm waiting to read them. Or at least hear you talk about how the whole writing process is coming along.. :P
I can't wait to read it!!!
It's easy enough to just e-mail yourself the story as you go along and make changes. Or e-mail it to people like me that can just let it sit on their computers for you just in case. You can't blame yourself for what happened to your writing, because what happened was completely unpredictable.
Point is, you can figure out ways to keep other copies of your work in places other than on your computer. Hell, you could just stick it on your site in a zip file somewhere, with no true link to access it. Or you could start up a free account on angelfire or what have you, and just dump the files there and never tell a soul.
Two words: Gmail
>_>
<_<
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