Purpose: To share and encourage. Writers can express doubts and concerns without fear of appearing foolish or weak. Those who have been through the fire can offer assistance and guidance. It’s a safe haven for insecure writers of all kinds!

Cohosts this Month Are:  Julie Flanders, Shannon Lawrence, Fundy Blue, and Heather Gardner!

The question for last month was do you finish what you write for nano??

Wow, that’s a tough question. I’m not sure I know what the answer is, since I’m never entirely sure where “finished” begins. Is it when you write the end, and mostly know the story? Is it when the whole thing is polished to a mirror finish?

I usually have enough steam that the first draft gets finished, assuming that I’m not working on a revision at the same time. Revision is usually my big, high-pressure thing, and I get to a point of gotta finish now.

I don’t always revise what I write for nano. If I’ve lost interest, or if the story just doesn’t seem to be up my alley, I may choose not to revise at all, or the revision might peter out before I have a final clean version. I’m learning to embrace the idea that not everything I write is for publication or even anything other than experience.

I have a wide assortment of manuscripts that I will never polish that well on my hard drive, and I feel like I’ve learned from all of them. The ones that I want to spend enough time on to make presentable are special.

One of the things I learned from revising my first manuscript–the very first one, and it was really hard, and really long–was that there’s something dangerous about having “THE” manuscript. If it’s the ONLY manuscript, it makes it much more difficult to make objective decisions about it, and you tend to keep revising forever. As soon as you have that second manuscript written, you start having real choices. And that’s when I stopped revising in circles and moved forward.