Unofficial NaNoWriMo – Halfway There

As of yesterday my retro-SF novel tentatively titled The Pathless Void is up to a little over 30,000 words. I’m realizing at this point that it’s not going to be finished at the end of the month, but that’s not necessarily a bad or unexpected thing. Novels of the genre for the “golden age” SF period tended to average somewhere around 80,000 words, so even assuming I make it to 60,000 by the end of the month there will still be more to go. I’m confident that I can keep up my pace after the end of the month, so that means the draft manuscript will most likely be finished some time in December.

I’m not going to make the same mistake as the last time I started a new novel for the November event. Demiurge, the sequel to Arcana, also was started as an unofficial NaNoWriMo project. At the end of the month I had 52,000 words, but then got stuck on the story and abandoned it for a couple of years while I worked on other projects. Now the draft manuscript is up to about 70,000 words and I think I know how I’m going to finish it, but I haven’t gone ahead and done it yet even though I last worked on it more than a year ago. I have no idea if The Pathless Void is going to interest publishers – my current publisher, Pendraig, publishes fantasy but not SF so I’ll have to either find another publisher or issue it myself as an e-book or something.

Have no fear, though – when I’m done with the book it will be made available in some form. Since I’m going to try other commercial publishers first it may be a little while before that happens, but rest assured that it will.