Danger Zone

Well, I’m close to 70% of my way through my NaNo book now. After looking over how much more story I have left to go, I suspect now that I’m going to have a very action-packed ending or my book will end up closer to 60,000 than 50,000. However, the more likely outcome is that both of these will happen. I’m still loving the experience of writing this book and feel quite attached to some of the characters and yet I can’t stop noticing that other random ideas keep jumping into my head. It seems to happen quite often for me that somewhere between halfway and three quarters of the way through a book or story, I start having ideas for other stories trying to tempt me away from finishing. I’ve started a separate document for jotting down pestering ideas for future writing so that I can try to forget about them and focus on finishing NaNo. So far I have two ideas for more YA novels I’d like to write and about half a dozen short stories. This would be all well and good but I actually feel like I have a lot of editing and revising work I’d like to do in December, and then I’ll probably want to start work on my second draft of the NaNo book in early 2010. This is not really a convenient time to have tempting new ideas try to lure me away from revision work on existing stories. The trouble is that writing a new story is, for me at least, always more tempting than going back polishing old ones. Maybe I’ll have to find a way to spend half my time working on revising old stuff and the other half writing new stories. I’m not sure how to go about this. Would it be better to spent half my writing time on each every day? Alternate days of writing new stories with days of editing? Or should it be longer on each like one week to work on new stories and then one week to work on the old? Does anyone have any recommendation or suggestions on how to balance the editing work with the writing new stories?

34103 / 50000 words. 68% done!