Now that you are almost finished with your NaNoWriMo Novel you have to force yourself to begin to think about what the next phase in this project will be. That’s right, you guessed it, the editing.
Well let me back up a bit, odds are that, unless you are writing a novella, you will not be entirely done with your whole novel by November 30th because novels do tend to be more than 50,000 words long. Most novels are double that. So your first order of business (if you are not in fact writing a novella) is to actually finish up the rest of your novel. But once that is done it is on to the editing.
Of course there will be many phases of editing but this will be your first crack at what you have just written and the first opportunity to change up your story and go back in and add things that you might have forgotten before. This is where the business side of writing kicks in because you have to not only think about what makes your story the best it can be, but you have to think strategically as if you were a reader buying the book.
I know you still have four days left after today to only be consumed with NaNoWriMo but if you don’t start thinking about what comes next it will overwhelm you. It’s time to start thinking about what comes next when you are finished with your novel; the marketing, the target audience, all of that. You don’t want to find yourself finished, questioning what’s next, without a plan.
Jimmetta Carpenter
Writer/Editor
The Diary: Succession of Lies (Now Available)
Writing as “Jaycee Durant”
http://unpleasantlyplump.wordpress.com/
http://www.facebook.com/people/Jimmetta-Carpenter/1069480310
Write 2 Be 
And one of the prizes that you can get from Createspace depends on you finishing with the edits by June, or so I believe. That was the incentive I needed to publish my first book, and now I have three out there ad this shall be number 4