Woooooo! Editing! Woooooo!
So today is the start of National Novel Editing Month, and I’m trying to work up some enthusiasm for it. NaNoEdMo is not as famous as good old NaNoWriMo, of course, for obvious reasons. Not only is it a lot easier to get excited about generating fresh, new, golden words than it is about slogging through fixing old ones, but it strikes me that tracking one’s wordcount is a lot easier than tracking editing time. The NaNoEdMo rules state that one has to put in 50 hours of editing during March to win, but how do you track that hour? Does time spent staring off into space thinking of the right word count? How about time doing a little online research on the behavior of honeybees? (and does it matter if there are any honeybees in the book?) How about breaks for email?
Well, at any rate, I’ve got some novels in serious need of editing, not least my NaNoWriMo effort, so I’m going to give it a shot. I’ve found that I seem to do better, in writing, editing, and whatever else, if I make something of a habit out of it, so I think this may work out. I am a bit concerned by the fact that the registration was called “complementary”, but I think the EdMo people use a third-party registration service, and heck, maybe they mean that their registration complements NaNoWriMo. From what I could see there seemed to be some writers who did NaNoWriMo seemed to think they had something all set to submit on December 1, which is a horrifying concept. So hopefully legions of NaNos will be editing along with me.