Friday Forays in Fiction: Camp NaNo Reconsiderations

My Camp NaNoWriMo Profile
See an excerpt of Blow Me a Candy Kiss there

I'm going to revise my Camp NaNo goals.  Sigh.  Am bringing the focus back to the storywork--the polising for self-pub of my short story Blow Me a Candy Kiss.

Below is the list from Tuesday's post.  The strike throughs are completed.  The grayed out are postponed for May's project:

• An edit pass to create a printable rewrite draft for marking up with page breaks at end of scenes. The primary fixes will be formatting, changing the indented paragraph and no line spaces to the WWW friendly form with no indents and blank lines between paragraphs.  Also increasing space between lines inside paragraphs to provide room for notations.
• Print hardcopy.  [The computer and printer's need marital therapy.]
• Print hardcopy of my beta reader's marked up copy
• An edit pass on the hard copy noting any issues as listed in edit passes below but primarily for structural and expansion and breaking up overlong paragraphs
• A structural rewrite that incorporates suggestions of my one beta reader and includes expansion of scenes, addition of scenes and extensive rewriting of many paragraphs. [This, the biggest task, has begun and will be ongoing at least through the second week]
• An edit pass for grammar and punctuation, word choice and word overuse and consistency of story facts.
• Read aloud noting any issues with how it sounds, listening for sour notes and tongue twisters and out-of-character voices in dialog, rewriting to fix
• An edit pass for spelling and typos and formatting consistency, including reformatting paragraphs to remove the extra space between lines.
• As time permits throughout, write new material for future Greg and Iris stories as encounters in Candy Kiss trigger memories or spark new ideas.  [Also begun and will continue throughout the month]
• Convert to epub
• An edit pass of epub for formatting issues created by the conversion
• Convert to mobi
• An edit pass of mobi for formatting issues created by the conversion
• Upload epub and mobi to Smashwords
• Upload mobi to Amazon to convert to Kindle
• Another edit pass of the Kindle for formatting issues

I realized as I created that list that I had not thought through all that will be involved in taking a text document into ebook formats.  Aside from the fact that it would be my first time and thus I would be learning new applications and their quirks, it adds several more editing passes which would mean I'd need to spend the whole last week of Camp NaNo on the ebook project.  

That is not the spirit of NaNo for me.

I want to spend the month rewriting and polishing the story. And adding new material for future stories with the same characters as encounters with things in this story remind me of things I'd intended or spark new ideas.

But the musing I did in Tuesday's post about increasing this story to 12K or more, even to novella length in time for the publication has been set aside.  I will allow work on first rough draft of new material for future stories but I know my style of rewrite and that first draft of musing on plot, snippets of dialog, snippets of description, character sketches, character monologues and musing on symbol, imagery and theme will need weeks worth of editing and the good protocol is to set it aside for a couple of weeks first and again between each of the edits.

So I'm going to make the epub project part of ROW80 round 2 goals and aim for mid to late May.  And then continue to work on the material for future stories for JuNoWriMo possibly completing the first rough draft of one of them.  The one I have in mind at the moment follows this one beginning on the following day but is in Greg's POV.

My plan is to publish Blow Me a Candy Kiss priced at 0.00.  I  know this is controversial and counter-intuitive but the story has been available on line in one form or another since my first web site in 1998 so I'm reluctant to start charging for it now.  My thought is this will be an icebreaker for me and a marketing benefit for the future stories and I hope, eventually, the collection of all the Greg and Iris stories into a full length novel.