NaNoWriMo 2016!

It's that time of year again! I looked at my author info and it says I've been participating in NaNo since 2011. That year getting through the 50k was hell. The stress of writing so much made me physically sick and I had to stop for almost two weeks in the middle. I only won that year thanks to my OCD and stubbornness not allowing me to give up on something I had set out to do.
       Fast forward five years and it's a whole different story. My writing group did our own NaNo in September. I wrote 85k in two weeks. A full novel in two weeks. I'm still amazed just thinking about it. Don't get me wrong, it's nothing pretty. Thanks to poor planning the characters completely flipped a quarter of the way through the story and every second word is a typo. But it's a framework that I can build upon with edits.
       Now that I know I can write insane amounts I've set myself a goal of writing a full novel this November. Since I can't for the life of me seem to be succinct, the novel will probably end up being about 100k. On top of this, I want to edit the novel I wrote in September and get out a few pieces of fic that I've had in my head for months that just don't seem to want to cooperate.
       Having checked my buddy list, only about a quarter seem to have created novels and are participating. It would be nice to have people to chat to during the month when I'm stressing out about everything. So if you're participating this year, my username is Write_Obsession.
       See you on the other side! 

Insecure Writer's Support Group: Ready or Not

Insecure Writer's Support Group is a blog hop hosted by Alex J. Cavanaugh where totally insecure writers can get together and share the things that are making us go argh!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
         

This month’s question is: When do you know your story is ready?

This is a difficult one to answer and it depends on so many factors such as world building, length, genre and the dreaded perfectionism. I’m sure I’ve mentioned before that my first novel took three years and eleven drafts before I even considered it ready to publish. I was new to self-publishing and just couldn’t let go of the fear that there was a massive plot hole or the story was boring. I pored over every draft to make sure the world building made sense and because I know I tend to be verbose, I tried to tighten the narrative as much as I could to keep word count down. With each of the initial drafts, I saw a vast improvement in the quality of my story, which was partially why it took so long for me to come to a decision that it was ready to be published. Eventually, the later drafts only had minor improvements and  any more tweaks were just me moving parts around to stall the inevitable. That's when I knew it was ready.