And thus begins December...

I am proud to say that as of 12:23pm on November 30th, 2012, I completed NaNoWriMo for the first time.

Extracting Demons is my first real attempt at novel writing and I am proud of where my first draft ended up. For the next few months, I will be spending extensive time editing and rewriting- a task not for the faint of heart to be sure. I am hoping that somewhere around February it will be ready for self publishing.

I've been going back and forth, wondering if I should go through all the anxiety of submitting query letters and trying to pick up a publishing house/agent/etc. I know in my heart this isn't the novel/series to do that with. Not to say that I don't think my work is good enough for publishing. It definitely will be once I am done with it. However, the genre I'm writing in is currently over-saturated and going the self publishing route makes more sense for me.

Once I get some editing done, I'll begin to post excerpts from the book. Other than that, I'm working on marketing myself, which is an extremely uncomfortable task for me. I just need to grow a set and do it, right?

Side note for anyone doing NaNoWriMo next year:

Using OpenOffice is not the best idea. The word count programming used in OpenOffice is different than the one used on the NaNo site. They count differently and when I first went to validate my word count, it was off by around 1200 words. Not what one wants to see when they think they are done! I double checked my word count using Google Drive. It seemed on par with the NaNo site.

So next year, while I might be writing in OpenOffice, I'll be checking the word count accurately using Google Drive each time I update.