Today, after much reading and re-reading of online documentation and filling out a series of forms, I finally self-published my cozy mystery, Alibis and Aspidistras, on Amazon Kindle (under the pen name Samantha Cornwell.) It started as my 2019 National Novel Writing Month project, and I spent a lot of 2020 revising it while keeping in touch with my writing friends on Slack, since actually meeting in a cafe was temporarily (!) impossible.

Then I spent the fall of 2020 and most of 2021 querying agents, as well as starting three other writing projects that I did not finish. Not yet. But now that I’m done with Alibis, it’s time to move to the next project: one of the three unfinished ones, currently titled Felonies and Fittonia.

I’ve signed up for Camp NaNoWriMo this April. I’ve got thirty days to write 50,000 words. I’ve got a notebook and a Scrivener file and a general account of what happens in the story, plus something like 15,00 words of a false start from last year. I’ve also got an idea–to make each chapter a kind of writing practice session. One chapter could emphasize description. One could emphasize dialogue. In another, I could work on showing emotions better.

Clearly the result wouldn’t be a particularly smooth draft. It would need a lot of reworking. But it would add an element of variety to the month, and maybe be a way of improving my writing. I think it’s worth giving it a try.

And remember, for NaNoWriMo, it’s quantity, not quality. Quality comes later.

Till next post.