It's November again, so I'm trying my hand again at writing a novel in a month. 50,000 words seems like such a daunting total, but it can be achieved fairly easily. I've succeeded three straight years, and this will be a fourth.
Thinking of the Hardy Boys can be very helpful. I just did a quick check, and the average line count in one of the books is 9, with 30 lines per page. A 200 page book yields 54,000 total words! So my goal for NaNoWriMo this year is to write a Hardy Boys book.
It has been a slow start since a storm knocked out power on the first, and it wasn't restored until late afternoon on the second… but I was able to write about 400 words on my phone the first day, and added 200 more on day two before the power came back. Since then, I've gotten my word count up to 5001, so I'm 1 word ahead of pace for the month!
I'm thinking about posting each chapter up on here as a blog entry as I finish it. That way you can read along with me as I write (assuming anyone actually reads any of these posts, lol). In any event, it gives me some convenient material to post on a daily (for the most part, anyway) basis. It will be nice to throw some content up here a bit more regularly.
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On another front, I'm still working on the video of my last major book repair. The audio got screwed up and didn't record, so I'm planning to run part of the video at double speed and record a VoiceOver explaining what I am doing as I go. This is at a standstill since the reason the audio got screwed up was because my headset bit the dust, and I need a new one.
I've been going through a number of my duplicates, and touching them up with PVA glue where the covers are starting to loosen from the text block. If I can fix these minor errors soon enough, I can keep these books from falling into the desperate condition I've been working on with titles so far. My original text copy of The Tower Treasure that I got at a yard sale for a quarter as a kid basically fell apart in my hands as I tried to mend it. In the end, I had to do more with it than any other so far. The front board actually fell off the spine as I was prepping the text block to get reattached. The outer cloth binding is basically rotted away. I used a strip of book repair tape on the inside of the cloth to hold it together, and some PVA inserted in the shoulder of the outer cloth to make sure it stuck down to the tape. It is back together, and I'll keep it for sentimental reasons, but I've got my eyes open for a better copy to replace it in my set.
I also have a picture cover copy of The Disappearing Floor in the original text that is coming apart in similar ways. I'm waiting to get a new headset for my computer, because that seems like a great candidate for another video attempt at repair. I may attempt a radical repair on it by trying to remove the boards entirely, glue a paper backing to the picture cloth in order to give it stability, then attach new boards and rebuild the cover of the book. It will be a real challenge and test of my ability, and I look forward to capturing it and sharing it with you.
I've begun reading through the Nancy Drew canon, and am very favorably impressed with the first three books. I found a really cheap copy of a later book in the series on eBay that had a split text block... Undaunted (after several successful repairs on Hardy Boys books), I scooped it up and will begin building (maybe literally) a set of Nancy Drews to share shelf space with the Hardy Boys. I'm looking forward to reading the book when it arrives, but almost as eagerly to doing the repairs on it to make it whole again!
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