The last year, I successfully enjoyed a full month of writing month at NaNoWriMo. My practical knowledge about how to organize my writing time and my words advanced tremendously. For one month I was set on automatic pilot doing editing in between, pleasantly doing my daily ratio of words, while evaluating my writing needs and eventually strong points.
12 months ago, I spent an amazing amount of time fighting to find my proper writing time and rhythm while working full time and being a mother 24/24. I also tried and succeeded in keeping an active social life, reading and editing my PhD paper and preparing for the final exam - which was successful this January, putting an end to more than five years of intensive working. Overall, it was an extremely exhausting month, but at the end I feel so energized that I was able to take important decisions for the next 12 months to go.
As I knew already, I can write relatively fast, but the editing process is always lagging behind. I am excited by my ideas as lons as they are on my mind. Thereafter, I don't care too much about the shape they took to enter the world. I am a bad mother, isn't it? Thus, the need of a complete reevaluation and reconsideration of my dedication and responsibility for the writing word. Whatever I was writing, putting my ideas on the paper - or e-paper respectively - was the easiest task and always enjoyed to do it in the most natural possible way. But, as I discovered when I published my first author book this year, the bad or absent editing is complicating the publishing process and is diminishing significantly the overall value of the work. Nobody will ever dedicate enough time - and money - to understand your brilliant ideas if you didn't write them in an almost perfect way.
One of the most important decisions I took after NaNoWriMo was to dedicate more time for improving my English and my writing. At the end of one year, I feel that my English is getting better, I published one book and preparing a travel memoir, that, in solidarity with the NaNoWriMo I hope to finish - editing and the marketing plan including - by the end of November. Meanwhile, another book - edited more than 10 times covering my PhD paper - is a grown up looking for a serious and academic edition house.
Overall, the writing life might be exciting and fun and my experience at NaNoWriMo was an useful exercise for my later "career". And, by the way, the manuscript of the book I've finished the last year - a chick lit about an online romance - is still unedited hidden somewhere in a folder. Maybe I will selfpublish it soon on Smashwords, who knows.
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