In 2010 I took part in Nanowrimo, or for those unfamiliar, National Novel Writing Month. I completed my first book, Never Give Up, because of that competition and have taken part many times since. I am hyper competitive and even though I know it is more of a self imposed thing it would have been mortifying to me to announce I was going to do it, update often, then fail to meet the word count by the end of the month. Fifty thousand words was a daunting task at the time but now it is more of a jumping off point. Even so, I love the pressure and impending deadline it brings.
Because of the success of finishing a story I had thought about for nearly a decade I wanted to do it all over again in 2011. I talked about it with friends, posted on social media about my intentions, got snacks and looked up the winner merchandise I would be purchasing when I finished the next book. There was just one problem; I had zero new ideas. During all the time I had been telling people about how excited I was to get to work I had never come up with a topic to write about. Life happened and I found myself aching to write but it was already November 8th when I dragged myself to the library and hid away in one of their quiet rooms, desperately searching through everything on my computer hoping for inspiration. I was about to give up when I came across a short story (3400 words) I had written several months previously.
After flipping through it a few times I was sure I could expand it into the needed fifty thousand words and what was better was I already had a basic outline for the story. I began typing and was able to reach just over seven thousand words that first day. By all accounts hitting that high in one day is great, however I was over a week behind. I spent every day I had off from work over the next two weeks diving into the story and doing my best to take those precious few words and make them into a novel. I was doing great until I hit about thirty-eight thousand words, and the end of the short story. I needed twelve thousand more and had just under four days to get there. I flailed. I admit it, I flailed.
When I finished, and I managed to do so with less than an hour left, I had the words verified on the Nanowrimo site then let it sit for a few weeks. I went back through it later on to do some editing and after I was satisfied I found all the typos I sent it to my editor to read through. Her response stays with me to this very day. She said, "They're good, I liked both of them." I explained it was one story, she laughed and said try again.
She was right. When I flailed for words everything changed. It went from a suspenseful story to a fluffy romance and other than the character names there was nothing about the two parts that suggested they were in the same book. I did my best to rewrite it but it still remained disjointed. I waited two years before attempting another rewrite. This time the book had one fluid storyline but it was dull and missing something. I stuffed it away, disgusted. It wasn't until just last year when I was going through some old pieces that I came across the original short story. The suspense story that first inspired me and I realized I changed the characters so much they were unrecognizable. I had no idea at the time how to fix it but with the amount of reading and listening to audiobooks I have done recently I have found myself driven to new ways of writing and am now ready to bring this story back to life with a completely new rewrite that recaptures the original theme and genre. Bring on Breathe!
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