Hot off the Press

About three years ago, a friend suggested to me that I might enjoying participating in NaNoWriMo. What's that? I asked. Turns out it stands for National Novel Writing Month, whereby you attempt to write a 50k-word novel during the month of November. I was knee-deep in my first novel at the time, so I politely declined. Then I declined the next year, and the next year...and then last year, when several friends told me they were going to do it together, and would I like to join them...

I thought about it. Decided that Engineer School didn't seem to be too hard, and that I would probably have some free time in the month of November, and said, sure! I'll sign up to write an entire novel in the span of a month. Never mind that the first one took eight years to write. A month sounds like plenty of time!

The rules were that you were allowed to think about characters and outlines before November, so I eagerly started character developing and outlining. When November 1st hit, I starting writing as quickly as I could. Keep in mind that my normal form of writing basically involves staring at a blank screen for about 10 minutes, writing a sentence, staring at the sentence I wrote for another five. Getting a whole paragraph down, erasing half of it, goofing off on the internet for 15 minutes. Write another two sentences. Lather, rinse, repeat for about two hours, and call it a night.

Well, I managed to be a little more disciplined this time around, and hit the 50k word count on November 25th. It took another 11k words and 4 more days to finish the story line that I had laid out, but by the end of November I had a functioning novel.

I've spent all of about two hours editing said novel, based on comments I got from other people that did NaNoWriMo with me. I might do some more serious editing at some point--it could certainly use it--but I decided that I wanted to share this book in less time than it took me to produce the first one.

So tonight I'm happy to announce that both this most recent Novel, 20 Days' Leave, and my first novel, Not by Sight, are available for purchase via CreateSpace. You can order them here:
20 Days' Leave
Not by Sight

They're nothing fancy. The covers are fairly plain. Neither has had professional editing, although I spent a lot of time (and had a lot of help) editing, revising, and re-writing Not by Sight. But I want to make them available to the larger community, so either I can do that now, or I can let them languish in search of free time to work on them.

One last note: if you received a first-printing copy of Not by Sight, this is the same edition. I haven't changed a single thing about the book. The only difference is that the copy from CreateSpace will have a glossy cover and an ISBN on the back.

Enjoy!