Join Me After NaNo

It’s that time of year again, and I’m once again participating in National Novel Writing Month – aka NaNoWriMo. I skipped the last few years, but twice in the past I’ve used nano to complete two manuscripts.

The idea behind the event is to encourage would-be writers to cheer on one another as participants attempt to complete an entire 50,000 word manuscript during the month of November. My first experience with the one month challenge was when I wrote the fourth novel in my mystery series. I kept a video blog of that experience, and it can still be found online here. Few people have actually bothered to watch it since I posted it in 2010, and I don’t expect many if any of you to go back and watch it now.

My second time with nano was the following year when I rewrote the second novel in my mystery series, having lost the original first draft in a catastrophic PC hard drive failure.

This time I’ll be using the opportunity to complete my entry in a new series several authors and I have been working to create. We developed a character and backstory together, and are working on a prequel novel which will act as a sort of pilot episode for the series. From there, each author has carte blanche to use the character in a novel of his or her own creation.

My novel will be tentatively titled On the Side of the Angel, and I’ve already created a cover concept. Each of the novels in the series will feature the badge seen on my cover indicating that it’s part of the Bartering Angel series.

Once November is over, I will hopefully have a completed first draft, and I will then need other eyes to help me sort out any issues with grammar, punctuation, spelling, and even craft issues such as story arc and character development. Readers who take on these responsibilities are known as beta readers, and I’m here to ask you to join that part of my team.

If you have any interest in being in on the ground floor of cleaning up a rough manuscript and bringing it to a fuller more realized state, just drop me a line. I’ll send you a copy and even include you in the acknowledgements of the completed book when it’s published.

As a teaser, here’s the story description I tossed together for the book’s nano page:

A woman with a "particular set of skills" has been forced to find a new life having faked her death and gone off grid. Finding herself in Pittsburgh with no friends, no job, and only the skeleton of a fictional identity, she must deal with some unsavory people if she hopes to bring the man who destroyed her family to some semblance of justice.