National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) is a great way to tackle that writing project that has been nagging at you for the past year, or ten! It doesn’t really matter if you have successfully written a 50,000 word manuscript before or are brand new to writing and have a few hundred words that might be the beginning of a great idea; in the end, working towards something is always better than staring at a blank page.

In this episode we list the many things you can do with your finished (or half-finished) manuscript. We share ideas of how to keep the NaNoWriMo energy going, and debate when to push further and aim for a polished product or when to simply recharge your batteries. Sometimes it’s best to sit on your manuscript and let it rest for a bit, at least until you know it’s the best you can make it and you’re ready to send it out into the world for feedback.

This site contains affiliate links to products that we have used and love, and that we think may be of help to you on your authorpreneur journey. We may receive a commission on sales of these products, which is how this podcast stays independent and free of advertising. Thanks for your support! Click here for a full list of recommended tools and resources. 

Visit our websites

• Crystal Hunt (Non-fiction)
• CJ Hunt (Romance)
• Michele Amitrani (Fiction)
• The Creative Academy for Writers (Community/Resources)

Transcript for Strategic Authorpreneur Episode 041: What to Do With Your NaNoWriMo Manuscript

Crystal Hunt: Hey there strategic authorpreneurs, I’m Crystal Hunt.

Michele Amitrani: And I’m Michele Amitrani. We’re here to help you save time, money and energy as you level up your writing career.

Crystal Hunt: Welcome to episode 41 of the Strategic Authorpreneur podcast. Congratulations to all of you, brave and busy scribes, who tackle NaNoWriMo this year. On today’s show we’re going to talk about what you can do with that manuscript now that you’ve safely made it through to the other side of NaNoWriMo. But first, what have we been working on this week? Michele, what have you been up to?

What has happened since the last episode?

Michele Amitrani: This month is all been about both the writing and the publishing side of things. It’s been a few weeks that I’ve been bothering you with all the stuff that I’ve been doing with the release of a couple of my books, Soul of Stone is out, and the Italian version of the same book it’s also out.

I mean relieved. I have, some of the pressure off of my shoulders but, I have to say November was also a month in which, somehow, I dunno exactly how I was able to crunch some words, because of my 12 by 20 challenge, I need to write something and release it. I did it, but it was surreal, Crystal and the reason was because I wrote a novella, basically it’s around 15,000, words in four days, four days and a half actually. And for the first time, it never happened to me before, but for the first time I wasn’t scared. Like I knew I would come up with something at the end, but literally it was like, the 23th, I was like: Ok, I’ve got an idea and in 30 minutes, because it was the end of the 23rd, I wrote the idea. And then from the 24th, I was like, okay, I know the story, because it’s based on one very famous mythological story, Sisyphus, and then I was like, okay, let’s try just, let’s give it a try, let’s see how it goes. And then the 24th, the 25th, 26th and the 27th, I spent them just them writing. I basically wrote down the number of hours, so on average, it was like four to five hours per day. And in like 20 hours, exactly 20 hours, the first draft was finished. I sent it to the first beta, then the second two betas, and then to six more betas.

And it was like surreal because again I’ve never done something like that. I was like, I don’t know what to say. It was like really weird. It was those four or five days I was like, on fire and I wrote the story. And this is not me saying that, but the feedback that I got so far were like, yeah, it’s one of the best story you wrote of the 11.

And if you’re interested, it’s called The Forever King. Strangely enough I didn’t have a lot of problems finding the title this time because there is a colleague of mine, that he’s releasing a fantasy, Epic fantasy, that it’s actually called the same. And I was like this title it’s actually very good for this story so I was like, maybe I’m going to use it. I’m not sure if it’s going to be the same title, because me and Crystal have been talking about rebranding some things, and, it might change, but for now, at least until the end of the 12 by 20 challenge, it’s going to remain the same title. So it’s still available for free for my newsletter subscribers.

I just want it to relate you this weird episode that happened to me. So my NaNoWriMo was basically the last four to five days of November, but definitely I was very happy and very blessed because you can see these just one little small spot left there. And it’s reserves … see? I can’t even talk … I’m too excited. It’s reserved for December. And I can’t believe … look at that: Glass Into Steel, Not That Fairytale, The Umbrella Paradox, Soul of Stone, The Muse of Avalon, Darker Than Night, Shards of Gods, Song of the Sea, Game of Light and Shadow, Never Wish and then Forever King, if you told, Crystal, 11 months ago you’re going to be able to write one story each month, and that you would probably love the most of them, I would not have believed you. I wouldn’t have laughed at your face, but we did this together, so that’s great. I still have December to go but, I feel since this is almost the end of the first series of the podcast that I have to be thankful for that.

So we’re going to talk about the NaNoWriMo and what to do with the staff we created this month, but I was also fairly positive that I wanted to let you know how important was that and that I was able to achieve that. So I’m very thankful and I wanted you to know. On the second things that are important to share the book of the day it’s actually a massive book that I want to recommend.

And it’s called Words of Radiance from Brandon Sanderson. And it’s the second book of his very famous series The Stormlight Archive. Yeah. He actually went out with the fourth and the newest one was released to 17 of November Rhythm of War.

I cannot wait to dive into this one. It’s a big book and I’m always scared of big books because first you can almost kill people with this. This is really big, but, I read the first book and I really liked it and I’m pretty sure this is going to be as good if not even more.

I didn’t read it yet, but I definitely recommend it just because of the name on the cover, from Brandon Sanderson. He’s a guarantee. So that was the book of the week for me, and I’m now excited to know development from my important, friend Crystal. What have you been up to? What did you do? I know that also you have to share a lot of updates.

Crystal Hunt: Yes. The Full Time Author book is now available for pre-order. So that is exciting the one that I lead cook and I co-wrote, so we are just in the last stages of preparing all the resources to go public for that. And also part of that kind of structure is actually making an author business plan for the coming year.

And so in preparation for that and to iron out all the fiddly bits in the actual business plan document, I’m teaching a masterclass in the Creative Academy on December 17th. So it is all about author business planning and we’re going to take the template that I’ve designed and work through it and see if it really does work the way I think it does.

And I’ve been doing my own business planning with it. So this will be the test run to make sure that everyone else can also use that same format. And then we will release it as one of the free resources for the Full Time Author book resource section. So for all of you, if you are on our mailing list, you will get a link to download that business plan for yourself as soon as it’s ready.

So if you are not yet on our mailing list, you probably want to go to strategicauthorpreneur.com and make sure that you click the button to get our just one thing delivered to your inbox each week. The other thing I’ve been doing is really diving into craft because I’m back in writing fiction mode and it’s been a little while since that was a primary focus. I’ve been working so much on the non-fiction that I have spent a lot of time watching replay videos from the Surrey international writers’ conference and working through different master classes and workshops to brush up. And also I was, reading the Stephen King On Writing book as well.

And one of the interesting things that has come up in the last little while when we do our planning for the creative Academy and what we’re going to teach and, what’s going to change in the new year, we have a good talk between all the partners about what people want to focus on in the new year and what we’ve been missing if there’s anything that has not been what we get to focus on at the moment. And for me, I found I’ve really been missing teaching about writing because the way that we set up our partnership and because of the fact that so much about indie publishing is really focused on the business side I think we sometimes forget to talk craft and actually in the introduction you can see, I have a little sticky note marked here, Stephen King actually talks about the fact that, if you’re a genre writer, people don’t often ask you to talk about craft. It is way less common than it is if you are a literary writer I think. And so that’s just something I’ve been thinking a lot about is how can I re-introduce that element in terms of really engaging with the writing on a daily basis and making sure that the writing is fun and I’m a writer, not just a business person. I think sometimes in certain stages of our growth, the balance can really swing to one direction or the other. And I really want to be able to focus on the actual writing part for the next little while.

So that’s part of my planning and why I hired an author assistance so that I have a helper. And, she can take care of a lot of the businessy side of things so that I can really deep dive into the characters and the stories and get back in touch with why it was so fun to be a writer in the first place and really focus on the characters and the world and all of that.

So while I did not do nano this year because I was trying to align everything so that in the new year I can start fresh, fully focused on the fiction. That was a lot of F’s in a row, some solid alliteration, but fully focusing on fiction in the new year is going to be, my project. However, I have done nano multiple years in the past.

I think most of the last 10 years I’ve done a nano project or done rebel nano when I was writing kids books, which is try to get to 50,000 words but that might actually mean writing three different books depending on what you were looking at and how long they were. So one or the other, it has worked some years.

I’ve won some years I haven’t, there’s been quite a variety of years in that way, but Michele have you ever tried Nano? I’m curious.

Our experience with NaNoWriMo

Michele Amitrani: Okay. I’ve never tried nano in my life, never a one single time. I do. I am part of the several writing communities and I know I have a writing friend and he tried … and I actually not long ago, read his project, Epic fantasy of more than 150,000 words.

That was just a draft born or from a NaNoWriMo project. And it was very good. I really liked it. And I don’t know how this guy could do that, but anyways, it was great. I never had attempted and nano following the guidelines, if there are any of these specific, undertaking, which is like writing a novel of 50,000 words.

And the reason is that I don’t think I am able at this point in my writing career to assemble my resources and write a full length novel in a month is just something I’m not able to do. That doesn’t mean that I don’t want to try or that it’s something that in the future I’m not gonna attempt to. With the 12 by 20 challenge though, I already said that and I’m going to repeat it I felt like it was NaNoWriMo every single month for me. Even though I didn’t write like 50,000 words every month. I don’t know if I didn’t broad 50,000 word, because like most of my words are crap, so I don’t publish them. And I do write a lot, at least for this 2020, I wrote the most. hands down, that I ever wrote in my life. Period.

The best year doesn’t even come close to 2020, and I think there are results. And I think that corkboard is one of them. Being able to release at least limit-release to my newsletter subscriber, 11 different stories. Actually, it’s more than that because Never Wish it’s a collection of short flash fiction, so it’s more than 12 stories already.

But no, I’ve never attempted NaNoWriMo, for the following reason: which is, I don’t think I’m good enough to do an attempt and actually finish a novel in the month. But, I’ve used 2020 to make sure that I have my own version of NaNoWriMo and so that I can see which are my limits.

So I know now that I can write several flash fiction in a month, that I can write a short story. That’s 5,000 words short story in a month. That I can write half a novel, because one of the things that is on that corkboard is half a novel, which is Game of Life and Shadow. It’s 20 something thousand words and it’s just the first off of a book, which I was not able to finish. If you remember, a few weeks ago, a few months ago, I attempted to explain to the audience that I was trying, after talking with a Crystal for some time, to actually write the novel in a month, which I didn’t succeed. I completely failed.

So I wrote half that month in and now me to write the second half because people are expecting it. So it’s a little bit of like serious. Like you don’t write the first part and then finish it because if you do readers are going to find you. So that’s something else that I’ve learned. But yeah, I never attempted NaNoWriMo as is known by most of the writers.

But I’m looking forward to, and I’m really curious to see where in the next year or more like three to five years, because this is going to be a long career hopefully what I’m being able to do. Maybe I’m not going to been able to write a 150,000 words epic fantasy in 30 days, but maybe my own version of maybe a mythological fantasy short novel.

Who knows? One thing that I wanted to ask you Crystal is, there are many people that I’m sure out there did finish that 50,000 words book and the whole content of this episode is trying to decide what they are going to do with that piece of craft, which most surely is like rough, needs to be editing, needs stuff to happen to it.

But I think the first thing is that they should give themselves a pack on their back. That’s what you say, right? it’s an achievement. It’s like … I can’t do that. So I can safely say that whatever you are out there and you, if you even attempted something like that, really congratulations, because it’s not something that everybody can do or will do.

So I think that’s one of the first things that it should come across. But at the same time I wanted to ask you Crystal first, maybe we should talk a bit about regrouping. So for a month, people didn’t see their families. Didn’t see them because they were so focused on their project. What would you suggest they to do to maybe prize themselves or to really regroup after these huge projects?

Regrouping after a huge project like NaNoWriMo

Crystal Hunt: I think that will be a little bit different for different people depending on what their own circumstances are. So if manage to get through nano by pre prepping some food deciding you didn’t really care if you got to the dishes or not, maybe your house is getting a little sketchy because the house cleaning went on the back burner. It’s possible that you basically locked yourself in your office and told your family to fend for themselves.

In which case you may have a little bit of chaos to deal with when you emerge from your writing cave. And so for a lot of people, you’re pretty tired because that, level of consistency or output, if you’re still working a day job and you’re fitting your writing in either early in the morning or your lunch breaks or at nighttime or all of the above, if you’re trying to get enough words in, then it may be that you just really need a bit of a rest for a few days to recalibrate and, poke your head up, take a look around, decide what areas have become chaos like you were not paying attention and often there’ll be a backlog of kind of emails or you’ll need to check in on your writer’s group forums. A lot of people try to turn off all their notifications during November so that they can concentrate on their book.

And so I think at the point that you’ve come up, just take a quick peak and see what’s going on so that you can make sure you haven’t missed that important reminder to renew your membership to your writer’s group or something like that. Maybe make sure you’ve got a few plans set up for the holidays.

Everything’s going to need to be shipped in order whatever this year. You have some holiday traditions that you’re hoping to partake of it’s a good time to get that stuff looked after, before you dive back into your novel. And I think whether we’re looking at Michele’s 20 by 20 challenge, I did a 40 by 40 challenge, which was trying to have 40 stories in my holiday world by my 40th birthday, which was 18 months of nano and I think both of us can apply our experiences from that in terms of how do you keep the energy going? It’s one thing when you do this sprint for a month and then life just goes back to normal. But what if you’re trying to get into a regular rhythm where you are writing more? I think that’s something we could talk about a little bit.

So how do you adapt that nano pace into your regular life so that you don’t lose all the momentum that you have managed to build up during that time? And this is going to be particularly important if you did not finish your entire manuscript. So even if you won nano in the sense that you wrote 50,000 words, it may be that you’re writing an Epic Fantasy and you’re not done yet.

It may be that you only got 30,000 words of the way through, which I refuse to say is losing because that is still an Epic accomplishment. If you haven’t got all the way through your words, Michele what are some bits of advice you would give to people who are wanting to keep going for a little bit longer until they actually hit the end of their story?

Michele Amitrani: I think there was a bit of advice that I got from a conference, The Creative Ink Conference, if I’m not mistaken in 2019, it’s a conference held in Vancouver area and there was a panel about, protecting your writing time.

And I didn’t know at that time exactly what they meant. But I think it’s a very good answer to your question, Crystal, I think writing consistently, and this might change for you, for the viewers and listeners, but for me, myself, I can speak from my experience. I found that, I’m not very good at pinch writing.

So burst of writing. So probably this is the reason why I’m I’ve never been very good at NaNoWriMo. What I do is I do, I really try very hard, do a bit every single day. I built an habit: the first thing that I do in the morning is trying to write and, get those words down.

That’s just me again it doesn’t have to be. But what I will suggest to the people that are listening to us is try to find out what is the thing that works for you. I know Crystal she’s more of a binge writers, so she might be able to in a day to write like something like a 10,000 words, she did that to any once a or 11,000, like a lot of words.

I can’t, even if I try. What I can try to attempt is putting in the hours. So there might be a moment in which I can write one hour and a half and then I have to stop, reread what I wrote and probably it’s also because it’s my second language. So not everything is clear to me at the first pass.

But that’s my system. That’s Michele Amitrani system. When Crystal asked me, what do you think you might be able to suggest to them? It’s ‘Know Thyself’. I think one of the suggestions, the best adjust, that as being given to me and that panel that I was hinting at, to defend your writing time, is that it doesn’t matter when you write or where you write, it just matter that even if you’re a pinch writer to make sure if you’re doing that in a month or two months, that you are getting those words out as much as you can, in my case would be like, just make sure that you can breath for one hour and a half, two hours a day. That’s it. If I can do that, I’m happy. I’m finding I’m doing it a bit less now because I’m on promotion and I’m promoting and publishing three books in the span of five to six weeks.

So it’s more hard for me to dedicate it to writing, but I still, if I can put those 30 minutes it will be a win for me. So it’s this habit that I’ve been nurturing from the beginning of 2020. Now basically, first thing you do, I wake up, wash my face and then I go down. Usually there’s a beautiful place where I’m living. There is a room where you can just stand up or you can sit and there nobody, I use that and I’m usually the first person that goes there and sometimes, especially in the last couple of months, I’m also the last person who leaves that room. So probably the person that passed by that room we’ll see me more than my wife, which is not necessarily good, but it’s something that I do just because of this month.

So I will say, know thyself, protect your writing time according to your specific need and your specific genetic as a writer, and also make sure that you get a good night’s sleep because I found out, especially in the first part of my 12 by 20 challenge, I used to set an alarm. So I set an alarm at six or six 30 in the morning, sometimes even before, crazy stuff.

Because I was like, I need to be the first person to wake up and the from 6:30 to eight 8:30, I need to have written two hours. I tried that for several months, everything that I got every single time, it was a headache because my body wasn’t prepared for that kind of a thing. So I decided not to put a timer anymore.

So now I wake up at maybe 7:30, 8:30. And I found I can write way better. And that’s again, just peoples that I learn to know myself a bit better as a writer. So I would never suggest you to do exactly what I do, but I will definitely suggest to a test. So we spoke, speak about test a lot. Test your ads, test your covers, test yourself as a writer because I’m sure that testing is going to pay dividends in the future.

And I would like to ask you a question, Crystal. I’m sure you’re going to give them different kinds of advice so when it comes to the first draft, but also the first piece of the story and what to do with that.

If you have anything to add to that conversation, of the keep going then, if you didn’t quite finish that draft and what you do with whatever was that you were able to harness from this month, what you would suggest them to do with whatever they have accomplished in November.

What to take away from NaNoWriMo

Crystal Hunt: I think the biggest thing that nano can teach us is when we are the most efficient writers and when we can drop the quickest into what we’re doing, and it maybe also gives us a little hint into some things in our lives that could be rearranged a little bit to make a bit more space for writing. So I think that’s the biggest takeaway is to take a moment and reflect back over that past month and ask yourself: were there specific times of day or specific times of the week when you were able to really get into the writing mode and get really efficient results with your time that you were spending on getting your words?

And is there any habit or pattern that you implemented in order to make it possible for you to keep writing? Let’s say maybe your kids got assigned to do the dishes or help out with laundry or something. Or maybe you rearranged pick-up drop-off schedules slightly or something in your household.

If there are anything like that you could keep in your schedule as you move forward after nano. So that’s a really good sort of beta testing period for what it looks like for you to be more of a writer or have more writing time than you might otherwise. So definitely that’s a good starting place so just making some notes for yourself.

I think when you do actually make it to the end of that draft celebrating, like we mentioned earlier is a really key thing to do. So make sure that you do something to really acknowledge that accomplishment, not just for you but also for the other people, whether it’s friends or people in your writer’s groups or your family who did pitch in to help make it possible for you to actually get that completed. It’s good for them to be part of that celebration as well, and to acknowledge their contribution and also your accomplishment in actually having done that. I think the next important thing to do is to actually put the story away for at least a week if not a couple of weeks to give you a little bit of perspective because when you’re that far inside of something, and it has been consuming you for the last month or longer, if you were plotting and planning beforehand in order to be able to just write like the wind, when you got in there, you really do need a little bit of space to reflect on what the story’s all about.

I know often when I get really into something and I’m writing really fast and I give it a little rest and come back to it it’s like reading something that somebody else wrote a lot of the time. And so that is actually very helpful because I think the biggest mistake that any author can make is taking their nano project and sending it out into the world immediately.

Our agent friends often talk about how following nano they would get just this rash of submissions that are books that are not yet ready for publication, because a lot of people who are maybe new to the industry, or this might be their first book, or they’ve written it, they think it’s the best thing ever and they send it out before they give it that time to sit and come back to it with their critical eye. So it’s really important that you do, after you’ve had your rest and you’ve, done a little house cleaning in your life, whatever that looks like to you, that you do actually bring a critical eye to it.

And I think there’s a couple of ways that you can tackle this. So if you are a pantser or a discovery writer or a gardener, those are all terms that are used to describe authors who will write not necessarily from a detailed outline and they discover the story as they write it. Then a strategy for those types of writers of which I am definitely one, I do some plotting, but I do a lot of discovery writing as well, we need to go back and reverse plot the novel after to make sure that we hit the story beats at the right times and that we incorporated all the elements that the readers of our genre are going to expect to see in a story.

We want to make sure that we wave some semblance of a three-act structure and that we are hitting the climax and the dark moment and all of those good things at the appropriate times. And the only way to really check up on that is do what I call reverse plot, which is you take the story structure and then you apply it to your manuscript instead of the other way around.

So that is a good exercise to do, and it will just help you identify where there might be issues. And if there’s anything you really notice, or that really stands out to you, then make a note of that and then go back and fix it. And that would be your first editorial pass. And I have actually written basically a developmental edit letter to myself in the best of just going through the manuscript and just making notes in the sidebar of my Scrivener document or on a separate notebook, whatever works, of where I notice things when I read through it from top to bottom, all in one go without being interrupted and that will give you a good start.

The second thing I think we need to do is make a plan for rewriting. And you might, if you have a critique partner, or if you have someone in your writer’s group that you are really close to and you’re comfortable giving an early draft to, then for a lot of people once you’ve done your own pass at developmental editing you might hand that off to your critique partner and get some feedback so that you have at least one set of outside eyes taking a look at things. For me, I pay a developmental editor and this is the point at which I would. hand it over to her potentially just to give me very high level feedback on the overall story arc, and does she understand the motivations of the characters and have I hit all of those story beats? And because I’ve done that check myself, I think maybe I have, but it’s always good to get another opinion because when we are so in the story, we cannot tell if we are missing things because our brain just fills in the gap.

Whether it’s somebody that you pay or somebody that you swapped with, or somebody who just fills that role in your life for you, and it was offered that you could get some feedback and have an inside, or an outside set of eyes look at your story and a nice detailed way. There’s one really great resource as well, that I really want to recommend it.

So when you get to the point of incorporating all that feedback, and you’ve done a bit of a general edit for yourself in terms of story structure, and then you’re at the point of actually polishing things up. There’s a couple of different ways to do that you can tackle each thing as its whole own edit and go through your manuscript a whole bunch of times, or if you are the kind of person who wants to do everything in one go, there is a resource from Holly Lyle on how to do your editing in a single pass. So it’s called one past manuscript revision and how you do all of that kind of in one cycle.

So we’re going to link to that resource for you from our show notes so that you can go check that out, but basically you’re printing out your document and then you’ve got a series of highlighter colors, and you’re working through your manuscript with all these different highlighters on the printed page, identifying all sorts of different things that need to be cleaned up.

And then you come back and actually dig into that. So I think that’s a great way to approach it if you are thinking, you’re gonna try to send out those manuscripts that you have created, then there are those three distinct phases of, you cleaning it up the best you can to yourself first, and then you hand it off to somebody else to give you feedback, maybe multiple somebody else’s and then you do another round of cleanup yourself and as thorough of a copy edit as you can manage and then if you feel like it’s as fixed up and ready that’s the point where you might consider pitching and putting together a package.

You may also want to actually work with an editor. You may want to get a bunch more beta readers to give you feedback at this point. It really depends on how experienced of an author you are. If it’s your first book you’re probably gonna want more feedback rather than less. If you’ve written 10 other books, then this is sort of the next in the series and you know exactly how all the pieces fit together, then you might be ready at this point to submit it, or just think about going through the steps to actually polish it for publication yourself eventually. So I think that’s the overall structure, but really not rushing into submitting it right away is really important.

And also not just publishing it right away is also really important. If you are a person who’s indie publishing, when you have an outlet, you don’t have to wait for an agent to say yes, or an editor to pick up your book for a publishing house. It can be tempting to just throw it in vellum and put it up on Kindle.

But I think resisting that urge for at least a couple of weeks and make sure that you have a chance to review it with fresh eyes and really think before you put it up as well, where does this fit in your business plan? A lot of people use nano as a time of kind of experimentation. So they might write in a genre that’s not what they’ve been working in their career.

They might be trying out some new characters or different kinds of books and I think just being really careful that you’ve given some thought to exactly how that project fits in to your larger career goals and not feeling like you have to put it out right away, you can wait and figure out exactly how you want to roll it out and how that wants to work then that is definitely beneficial. The books that are… and I have to say I’ve done this where I wrote a book in nano we ran it through a ton of editing passes in December, and we’d release it on Christmas Eve and that was fun and it went fine. I also had a lot of paid help to pull that off.

It’s a pretty tight schedule and fairly stressful and if you are publishing wide, you really need to have your stuff submitted by like the first week of December to all the channels to guarantee a Christmas release and you won’t have had time to set up your promos and you won’t have any reviews on your book and everything else.

As hard as it can be to hold off, sometimes writing a book during nano and then sitting on it until the following holiday season is actually a lot more effective if it’s like holiday specific content. And if it’s not holiday specific content, then just sit down and think about what your ideal timeline would be in order to either be polishing your manuscript enough to be pitching it and sending it out, or if you’re going to indie publish it, thinking about what is your ideal timeline and where does it best fit in your release schedule plans for the year? And to help you figure all that out the business planning template has a whole section on your production schedule for the year.

So I think, that can help you if you’re not sure how those pieces fit together, that can help you figure out when, where, and how you might want to tackle, unleashing your nano creation onto the world. All right. Let’s tackle our curious jars, speaking of how we want to tackle things. Okay. So the jar is here. The jar is open. I’m narrating. For those of you who are not on YouTube and you can’t see all the shiny, papers of different colours inside the jar. I’m gonna rifle my hand around Michele is going to tell me when to stop.

What is the most words you’ve ever written at one time?

Michele Amitrani: Stop

Crystal Hunt Oh, pink one. Okay. Awesome. Okay. Thanks universe. What is the most words you’ve ever written at one time?

Michele Amitrani: One more time?

Crystal Hunt: What is the most words you’ve ever written that one time? So I think talking about volume of words, you’ve written in one sitting or one day,

Michele Amitrani: I was 6,000 words in one day, I think for one of my science fiction books in Italian, which is my first language. In English probably around 3,000

Yeah, but I will say in a day in one language Italian around 6,000 words … yeah, 6,000 words. What about you Crystal?

Crystal Hunt: I wrote, I put it on my little, Ooh, I put it on my little goal board here because, it’s not something I can repeat very often. I had this chart that would highlight in a different color.

Anytime I got over 10,000 words and my best words in day, according to this chart is 13,232. And that was July 28th but it was not this past year was the year before. So about a year and a half ago. And I had been writing like a ton that year. I was all in on the fiction and I had a really tight deadline to turn something around, to have enough time to get it edited before it was going off to audio book production.

And so I, yeah, I just dropped right into that story and wrote like the wind, and it was fun, but that was a very long day. Like I think I set my alarm for 6:00 AM and I was still writing at 11 o’clock at night. I usually can write about 1500 words an hour when I’m really into a story, but I can’t really maintain that for long periods of time.

It just I get too tired of my body starts to break down. I’m not 20 anymore. So sitting at my desk for extended hours, or I usually right cross-legged in my beanbag chair and after 10 or 12 hours of that it’s pretty cranky. So that is definitely a thing. But we’ll see one day, maybe I’ll be able to break that record, but I haven’t been able to break it since that day, we’ll see.

Michele Amitrani: Destiny way of saying something particular. That’s not a normal number.

Crystal Hunt: Yep. Everything was lining up nicely. So I don’t know anybody out there, if you do numerology and you want to crunch those numbers and tell me what all that means. I would be happy to hear it. Otherwise it’s just the number to beat in my world at the moment.

Michele Amitrani: Okay. And that’d be said, for you guys if you are interested in the show notes of this episode, for links to resources that we mentioned and for the coupons and discounts on the tools that we use and love, you can visit us@strategicauthorpreneur.com. And please make sure you sign up for our just one thing weekly email, which we release on Mondays.

Crystal Hunt: And be sure to hit the subscribe button wherever you’re listening to this podcast. Especially if you’re on YouTube. So you don’t miss out on the bonus episode, we’re putting together for you next week, which is actually going to be our final episode in season one of the podcast. We’re going to do a little regroup.

We’re going to upgrade some of our tools and systems. We’re going to put together a. Seriously, kick ass publication schedule for you in 2021, because we are pretty excited about all the things coming up this year. And we’re going to give you some hints about what exactly will be involved in that in the next bonus episode.

So be sure to check back with us next week and in the meantime, go get your name on our mailing list so you don’t miss out on the business plan for 2021. You too can get in on the exciting planning adventure as we get ready to say goodbye, 2020. See you later.

Michele Amitrani: And we’ll see next week.

Crystal Hunt: Bye.