National Novel Writing Month and The Canary

 

By Kristy McCaffrey

Last month was National Novel Writing Month, or NaNoWriMo for short. During November, writers from around the world try to write a 50,000-word novel. I signed up to punch out a first draft of my next Wings of the West book, The Canary, and I’m happy to report that I made it to 50k. Is the manuscript readable? Well, kinda ….

This is the fourth time I’ve participated in NaNo, and after much revising I’m happy to say the previous three projects all went to publication (The Blackbird, Deep Blue, and The Starling). The Canary will also need some work, but I’m pleased with what I have.

For previous NaNo’s, my goal was to get to some version of the end of the story, because it often helps to know the ending in order to fine-tune the beginning. This means skipping interior scenes, since my books usually fall between 75-85k.

For this NaNo, however, I changed my method. When I hit 40k, I realized I didn’t like my first chapter. I was working with a fake marriage trope between the main characters, Sarah Ryan and paleontologist Dr. Jack Brenner, but the initial setup left me feeling lackluster. In the first one, Sarah pretends to be married to Jack because she’s run into one of her professors who’s been harassing her, and she’s frightened to be in the Arizona desert with this man. But as I kept writing this premise, I felt it weakened Sarah’s character.

So, for the last 10k of NaNo, I rewrote the first five chapters from scratch, using a different approach to get Sarah and Jack “hitched,” and I like this one much better. I’ll have to tear apart the rest of what I have and repurpose it, but this is how I generally work anyway.

I have a few other projects I must return to, so I’ll start revising The Canary in February. This will allow me time to do more research, which is challenging when trying to write 2,000 words every day. (If you write each day of November during NaNo, you only need 1667 words, but I overwrote so that I could take time off around Thanksgiving).

I will say, though, that the more I read about the dinosaur fossils in the Painted Desert in the late 1800’s, the more intrigued I become.

I’m very excited for this book, and I hope the readers will love it too.

You can pre-order The Canary now at Amazon, Apple Books, and Barnes & Noble. (It will also be available at Google Play Books and Kobo but closer to the release date of July 25, 2023.)

Would you like a Christmas card from me for 2022? Fill out this Google doc and I’ll add you to the list.

Happy Holidays to you and yours!

 

Write A Novel In A Month #NaNoWriMo

By Kristy McCaffrey

If you’ve been on Facebook or Twitter, then you might have seen posts about National Novel Writing Month, or NaNoWriMo. During the month of November writers from around the world collectively put their butts in the chair and pound out a novel. There’s a website where you can register your project, track your daily word count, and interact with your friends and colleagues who are also participating. To win NaNo, you must write 50,000 words by November 30. If you’re a writer, you know how tough this can be. And if you’re a reader, you might wonder what all the fuss is about.

I’ve successfully completed two previous NaNo’s—the first was for my western romance THE BLACKBIRD (2014), and the second was my romantic suspense novel about great white sharks titled DEEP BLUE (2016).

How does NaNo benefit a writer? It forces the internal editor to take a vacation. Believe me, this is far harder than it sounds, and is probably the biggest battleground an author will face in trying to complete NaNo. The internal editor not only encompasses good sentence structure and proper grammar, he/she also wants fully-fleshed characters right out of the gate, will insist on researching the name of the road in that western town in 1877 before allowing any more forward movement in the story, and wants to investigate every Irish surname for a secondary character who only appears in one scene. The internal editor can be the harshest of critics, and many a writer has succumbed to crippling self-doubt as a result.

But if an author has already published several novels, he/she must have found a way to work with this ridiculously overbearing boss, right? Excuse me while I laugh hysterically. Okay, I’m back. The short answer is, no. But all is not lost, and that’s where NaNo helps writers to shine. It forces us to push past the persnickety side-commentator and get the story down. NaNo is all about the first draft—those random and sometimes illogical beginnings of our stories. As a reader, all you’ve ever seen is the spiffed up final version of a project, so it’s hard to understand that it didn’t always look that way. Most first drafts would shock the spit right out of you. Just kidding. They’re not that horrifying, but they can be quite the hot mess.

To write 50,000 words in one month (and November only has 30 days), a writer must punch out 1,667 words per day. I usually round up to 2,000, because life doesn’t stop for me to write, so there will be days when I don’t hit that goal. Since my novels tend to be 75-85K in length, writing 50K won’t be the entire book. This leads to the most important advice I can offer about NaNo—make sure you get to THE END. This means that some scenes will be skipped, heavy description and backstory will be lightly touched upon, and character development will be invariably sketchy. But this is a good thing. Getting to the end offers insights that can’t be found any other way, and it will make the first revision pass much more fruitful.

One quirk I’ve learned during NaNo is that my scenes end up out of order. Since I know this about myself, I don’t spend too much time in my transitions from one incident to the next, because I’ll likely be moving them around later. I simply try to find the interior energy of a scene and expound on that as best I can. Then I move on. You can’t dilly-dally during NaNo.

And while it’s true I’ll be forced to discard large chunks of my preciously speed-written prose during the refining stages of the manuscript, it’s never wasted. I almost always learn something from the misstep, either about my characters or a plot direction that wasn’t going to work. I’ve also had delightful surprises. I didn’t find the great white shark star of my suspense book until the very end of the first draft. Her name was Bonnie, and when she arrived she changed the whole tone of the story. That’s why it’s important to get to the end. Once I knew about her, it was clear how I needed to lay the groundwork for her presence earlier in the book, and it completely informed the direction of my revisions.

This year, I’m unofficially participating and I won’t lie, it’s stressful. Some days I just can’t figure out what should happen next, and my mind’s innate tendency to wander off—online Christmas shopping! Let’s do that!—must be held in rigorous check. The manuscript (ANCIENT WINDS, the third book in my suspense series) is unfolding in a choppy and somewhat haphazard way, and it’s downright maddening. But … I’m finding those little gems along the way. (I have a fabulous scene in the Amazonian jungle with my hero and heroine and an anaconda that quite surprised me.) And this is because NaNo doesn’t let up; it forces you to write something. Anything. It inspires innovation.

So, if you’re a writer and haven’t given NaNo a try, consider it. You might astonish yourself. And if you’re a reader, have sympathy for those participating. We won’t be grumpy lunatics for long.

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NaNoWriMo

By Kristy McCaffrey

NaNoWriMo stands for National Novel Writing Month. Each November, writers everywhere attempt to write a novel in 30 days. To ‘win’, you must write 50,000 words. This is approximately the length of a long novella. My books tend to run between 70,000 and 85,000 words, so this endeavor doesn’t yield a complete novel for me, however, I’ve always made an effort to get to THE END by skipping scenes and lengthy descriptions along the way.

I’ve just completed my second NaNo and I’m happy to report that I met the goal of 50K. But it wasn’t easy. NaNo never is. That’s the point. It pushes a writer to their creative limits and beyond.

To reach 50K in 30 days, a writer must punch out 1667 words per day. Since there’s a U.S. holiday smack-dab in November (Thanksgiving), I set a goal of 2000 words per day. This would give me some cushion and allow me to take a few days off while I had a house filled with family. It also provided a buffer for those days when the words just weren’t flowing, as well as the unexpected event (mid-November my husband and I had to transfer our youngest daughter rather abruptly from boarding school, throwing a stressful wrench into my schedule).

NaNo teaches discipline. For me, writing 2000 words (4 single-spaced, typed pages) often takes several hours. And some days, it was so bleepin’ hard. I knew my story, I knew the main characters (well, kinda), and I knew the pathos I was searching for, but writing them down is always something entirely different. Scenes veer off-course and characters behave differently than imagined, and because of the pace of NaNo there’s no time to breathe. No editing, no languishing in research books searching for ideas to spark my ideas. In some ways, it’s a bulldozer approach. But it is effective.

I now have a beautiful, somewhat messy, first draft. Even better, I know my hero and heroine in ways I hadn’t anticipated. I’ve been in the trenches with them. I’ve found their strengths as well as their weaknesses. Now, I can revise and use these to the advantage of the story. But there’s also a slew of inconsistent plot points, repetition, characters who serve no purpose at all, and what I call ‘pivoting’, when I made a major change mid-story but didn’t go back to fix the earlier parts—I moved forward as if I’d already changed them. If anyone was to read this first draft, they would surely say: What were you thinking? But this process is highly productive, which is why so many writers participate each year, logging into our accounts each day to post our progress, reading motivating messages from big-time authors, and tracking the momentum of our writing buddies. NaNo brings out our competitive nature and that’s not a bad thing. It’s the Ironman event for writers.

The manuscript I produced isn’t my usual stuff. With the conclusion of my Wings of the West series this year, I decided to take a break from historical western romances and write something else I love—women exploring the world. Tentatively titled DEEP BLUE, this first book in a new series is a contemporary romance set against the backdrop of great white shark research. My heroine, Grace, is a marine biologist who likes to get up close and personal with her subjects. The hero, Alec, is hired to film a documentary about her, to aid Grace in her quest to provide conservation measures for the sharks, but he’s also haunted by a previous expedition that went horribly wrong. His growing feelings for Grace leave him conflicted about how far to push the boundaries between humans and the great whites that inhabit the waters around Guadalupe Island in Baja California.

It’s my hope to have a revised manuscript completed in the next several weeks and release it in the spring of 2017, if all goes well. Thanks to NaNo, the most challenging part is complete—the first draft. Facing the unknown abyss of a story can be disconcerting. NaNo forces a writer into those murky depths. It’s true—creative undertakings can be frightening and writers often develop sly little evasion mechanisms to avoid facing a blank page and the daunting task of writing an entire book. But there’s no magic formula—it’s all in the baby steps and steady progress, and NaNo provides that in a very compressed and intense atmosphere.

Are you a writer? Wanna give NaNo a try? Check out their website and finish your book at last.

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Evolution Of A Novel

By Kristy McCaffrey

I’m in the process of readying my fifth novel for release. While I would love to say that I know the ins-and-outs of this writing thing, I can’t. Each book I’ve penned presents its own challenges, and with each I was at a different stage of my composition skills.

This is the first book that I’ve written fast. I’ve always called myself a slow writer because I was. Toiling away with a small press meant no real deadlines, so I never gave myself any either. I wrote to my creative whims. If I came to a crossroads in a story and was unsure of the direction, I easily took a three month break to await inspiration. As you can imagine, it took me years to write my first four books.

An important aspect of this slowness concerned my writing confidence. While I can’t say I’m super-assured at this point, I did make a deliberate effort to improve my skills, to network with other writers who could help me, to read more, and to look up grammar issues to make sure I was getting it right. I also had the opportunity to clean up my first three books to re-release them. That was an eye-opener. The sloppiness in prose jumped off the pages. I think the simple fact that I could recognize this helped me feel more convinced that my skills have improved (all cringing aside).

I wrote the first draft of THE BLACKBIRD (Book Four in my Wings of the West historical western romance series) in one push during the month of November. I participated in National Novel Writing Month, a worldwide endeavor to finish a novel in 30 days. I’d never done anything like it before, and I’d certainly never written so quickly. I was curious to try.

To ‘win’ the challenge, writers had to type out 50,000 words. This isn’t quite the length of a novel since most are around 70-80,000 words, but the goal was to get a decent outline completed. I quickly realized that to hit my daily word count of 2000 (I knew I’d have to take off Thanksgiving at the end of the month so I wrote more than the recommended 1667 words each day), I couldn’t move slowly or dawdle too much on my characters, or descriptions, or the plot. Some writers are pantsers, living in a world where ‘what will come will come’, but I wasn’t one of those. I had to discard all my carefully laid plans of meticulous research. This was especially grueling as I built three chapters around a fort in the Arizona Territory I wasn’t even certain existed.

It was a wild November (we writers do love the crazy), but I did it. And, I pushed to get to the end of the book. I did this by glossing over certain scenes, then moving on. I skipped descriptions—the hero carried a gun and rode a horse but I didn’t know what kind. I wrote hero’s backstory (with the Apache Indians) by using markers like ‘B Indian talks to C Indian from the D tribe’. But don’t get me wrong, I did do preliminary research in October to make sure I was heading generally in the right direction. There were, however, many details I simply didn’t have time to fact-check if I wanted to make my word count each day.

This type of intuitive writing is both exhilarating and scary. It can lead to serious misdirection, and hence much rewriting, but it also lets the plot breathe through the writer unfettered. I found hidden gems in the story I had no idea were present, such as what really happened to the heroine when she was assaulted two years prior. The twist really surprised me. But in the rough edges of this first draft I also found I needed additional time to find the best way to tie it all up, to cut away the fluff. This is where my best-laid plans suffered. I was unable to meet my March 2015 release date. I pushed it to April, and began worrying about whether I’d get it done by then, too.

By mid-March, I made it through a fairly thorough edit of the first draft, cleaning up and tying bows and ribbons wherever I could, but as I got near the end I found a major glitch. I needed a better motivation between the bad guy and the heroine’s father, a rather ambiguous character who I hadn’t decided was good OR bad. My husband offered to help. Over dinner, I explained the story—and many subplots. It was impressive that he didn’t doze off. Finally, his advice was to offer a simple explanation for why something had happened in the backstory. And he was right. When in doubt, take the most obvious, easiest solution because that will make the most sense. The key, of course, is not to reveal all this to the reader, doling it out throughout the story.

So, back to another editing pass. I’m just about complete with it, then it’ll go to the editor. Despite a deadline looming, this is really the most fun part of penning a novel, at least for me. It’s when the very finest of details are added, and it always feels like packing moist, sweet earth into the cracks of the world I’ve created.

Hang tight, readers. I’ll get this published by the end of April. Cheers!

Arizona Territory 1877

Bounty hunter Cale Walker arrives in Tucson to search for J. Howard “Hank” Carlisle at the request of his daughter, Tess. Hank mentored Cale before a falling out divided them, and a mountain lion attack left Cale nearly dead. Rescued by a band of Nednai Apache, his wounds were considered a powerful omen and he was taught the ways of a di-yin, or a medicine man. To locate Hank, Cale must enter the Dragoon Mountains, straddling two worlds that no longer fit. But he has an even bigger problem—finding a way into the heart of a young woman determined to live life as a bystander.

For two years, Tess Carlisle has tried to heal the mental and physical wounds of a deadly assault by one of her papá’s men. Continuing the traditions of her Mexican heritage, she has honed her skills as a cuentista, a storyteller and a Keeper of the Old Ways. But with no contact from her father since the attack, she fears the worst. Tess knows that to reenter Hank Carlisle’s world is a dangerous endeavor, and her only hope is Cale Walker, a man unlike any she has ever known. Determined to make a journey that could lead straight into the path of her attacker, she hardens her resolve along with her heart. But Cale makes her yearn for something she vowed she never would—love.