History That Never Was

Home of Dawn Vogel: Writer, Historian, Geek

Returning to Long Form Writing

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I started the year deciding that I didn’t want to write longer works for 2022, unless I came up with an idea that absolutely had to be longer. And I wound up with one of those ideas. And then a second one, when I realized the first one wouldn’t work as I had planned it.

So I spent the month of July drafting a Regency-era Gothic novella. It still needs quite a bit of work, but I wrote almost 30,000 words. It was definitely a slog, and some days I just really couldn’t get substantial words on the page. But writing about 5,000 words a week on a longer project IS doable on my lunch breaks three days a week and weekends. It only winds up being about 1,000 words in each session, and I’ve found that once I get going, I can knock that out in about half an hour. It’s a very ROUGH first draft, but there are words on paper, and those are much easier to revise than words that are not on paper yet.

The first idea seems like it’s going to be a longer piece, also set in the Regency-era, and I think I’m going to attempt that one in November for NaNoWriMo. That’s a bit more of a challenge, because only writing five days a week in November would mean needing to write closer to 2,000 words a day, if not more because of my plans that month. But I’ll see if I can do it, and even if I can’t keep up the pace to get 50,000 words, I can at least get a good chunk of a novel written.

I don’t know that this will be a permanent return to writing long, but I had fun with the research and the writing of this novella. So maybe I’ll just focus on longer form Regency-era stuff. It’s a great fit with my history background and research skills. And based on the success of BridgertonSanditon, and basically everything adaptation of Jane Austen ever, maybe that’s the right place for me to be focusing my attention for something marketable!


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