April Camp NaNo First Day

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

My goal as stated in Friday's post is to get my 6000 word short story Blow Me a Candy Kiss prepped for self-pub.  This entails:

• 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
• 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.
• 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.
• 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

So a pretty productive first day.  I made the first edit pass to create a print copy for marking up but still need to reformat the paragraphs to increase space between lines.  Couldn't print today because my Aspire and both printers need relationship counseling.

On my way through I rewrote a few paragraphs to remove wordiness or tangled grammar or to shorten or break up some overlong paragraphs.  Also clarified some confusing bits and italicized character thoughts.

Along the way I made some mental notes about possible expansion--scenes that I remember in my head from the early drafts in 87-91 that aren't included in the only draft I have left from that era.  Those scenes were cut because I was trying to get a 10K word story cut down to 6K or less for a short story contest.  I succeeded but chickened out submitting it.

Some of my other mental notes included backstory, scenes I'd imagined adding to it over the years and scenes from a second story that relates the events of the months following this one.  Some of what I'd like to include is Greg and Iris's childhood friendship and how it segues into courtship; the day three year old Candy goes to a petting farm to ride a pony and suffers the allergy attack that changes the trajectory of her life; the day Iris met Faye and Inny and Wilma and Julia from my novel, The Substance of Things Hoped for, in the care facility where both Candy and Inny were in comas...and many more.

It's possible I could expand this into a 60-80K novel but for this current project I hope to,at minimum, double it to 12K.  But what I'd really like to have is a novella or novelette length before publishing as I think they sell better than single short stories.