Nanowrimo spotlight: Listening to your book

Good morning! I’ve got a new spotlight for you, from Mariah. Here’s Mariah talking about her Nano experiences:

I believe I’ve participated in NaNoWriMo every year since 2005 or so I believe. A couple years were on accounts that have been long since lost to the ages, a couple without even using the NaNo site. Most years I’ve won. I usually do pretty well with front loading, I write a lot up front and then start to slack as the month goes on. Sort of the opposite of what I see from most people.

I had a couple epic failures, one where I spent the entire time designing a solar system, all the math included. A couple successes too, Dangerous Metal was the book I wrote in 2014, which was a from scratch rewrite of a book I wrote in 2013. The rewrite on it was basically throwing out the plot, and a couple of the characters, and the genre. So I had the main character and her background and a few side characters. Everything else was rewritten for that one.

What are you writing about this year?
I’m doing another rewrite this year. The novel I wrote during Camp NaNo a couple years ago is an urban fantasy story. I really think it is strong, but I need to make some changes to match up with the second book I wrote last NaNoWriMo proper. I’m currently calling it the fantastically catchy title of “Jenna’s first book”. It is a story that needs a character cut out (sadly the love interest, but he just didn’t bring enough to the table), another character amped way up (he’s the one who always should have been the love interest, why was I holding them back!), a different kind of try fail cycle on a few things, and much more background. I’ve been toying with the idea of not just rewriting from scratch, but I do think that I’ll create a better end product if I just start over entirely. We’ll see how long that lasts though.