Sam Downing

Here’s a cheeseball-fabulous video I make a point of watching on the first day of summer each year, because I’m a huge lame-o. (But not as big a lame-o as you guys in the snowy, wintry, gloomy Northern hemisphere!):

December 1 marks the end of Nanorevismo for 2009. (Ditto Nanowrimo. Kudos to those who had a go – you have my respect, and my sympathy.) But just because the month has finished doesn’t mean my revisions have!

Last night, on the final evening in November, I pulled My Book’s word count back under 100,000 to a not-much-smaller-yet-somehow-more-manageable 99,919. Now I know how dieters feel when they manage to squeeze back into a pair of old jeans.

Let the wild rumpus countdown to 95k words start!

(Yeah, I saw Where the Wild Things Are last night.)

I have never participated in NaNoWriMo, because it took me more than five years to complete one novel and even the thought of spitting out a whole one in a month is morbid and terrifying.

And when I say “complete one novel” I mean “write something that has a beginning, middle and an end”. It is yet to be edited, so I am well chuffed to have stumbled upon NaNoRevismo (something I had conveniently planned on anyway), a whole month devoted to “[plunging] yourself into the filthy, glorious work that is revision”.

Yay!

Slashing unwanted adverbs and pointless filler and nonsensical garbage (I honestly have no idea what I meant when I wrote “the gold sunset [was] dispelled by the hues radiating upwards from clusters of imperious high-rises”. Huh?) is fun! On the other hand, I’m beginning to understand the meaning of “Kill your darlings”. Chopping out some of those sparkling-and-clever-but-ultimately-useless turns of phrase is hard.