1 week ago

So a week ago right about now I finished the first draft of my NaNoWriMo novel. See my fancy badge over there? Yay me!

At the time it all felt rather underwhelming, honestly. Almost anti-climactic.

But since then, and you’ll think this is silly I have no doubt, but since then I’ve felt different. I see things, some of the time, with a different set of eyes. I read something in the paper or overhear people talking and I start imagining the events fit into one of my stories, usually with a twist.

Its cool. I don’t know how to keep this feeling, though, and I fear it’ll slip away. I guess I just have to keep on writing!

Next steps

Well, this isn’t really the next step, its a few steps out, but space is limited, first come, first served, and all that rot.

I just bought a membership to the World Fantasy Convention that is being held next November (yes, a year off) in Austin, TX.

If you’re a fantasy fan, the list of attendees should interest you. Mike Stackpole says that this is the place to go to meet editors and other authors who might help you to get a book published.

And no, I don’t really imagine I’ll have a book in publishable form by then, but I still want to start networking…

No Plot, No Problem

No Plot, No Problem Having finished writing my NaNoWriMo novel, I sat down to read the final chapters of No Plot? No Problem! by Chris Baty. The book is all about writing a novel in a month, and though it says you can pick any old month, it was clearly designed to promote and/or accompany nanowrimo.org. And I was forbidden to read these last chapters until after I finished!

Baty has a lot of fun with the book and its a nice read even if you’re not intending to do NaNo. He walks you through getting ready to write, coming up with a starting point, and then sends you off. But the back part of the book has a chapter for each week of November, and it was uncanny how accurate they were. When he said I’d be struggling…I was struggling! When he said words would be flying by, they were.

The end of the book talks about next steps. Determining if your NaNovel is worth polishing into a finished novel or not, and if it is, how to go about doing that. (Interestingly, he suggests it’ll take about a year to do re-writes on the book you wrote in a month!)

Throughout this month-long process, No Plot? No Problem! has offered tips as well as inspiration. Doing NaNoWriMo would be really freakin’ hard on your own, I think. I was lucky enough to have friends who supported me in ways beyond imagining. But if you were on a desert island, cut off from humanity, this book could serve as your friend and cheerleader.

Absolutely recommended, but probably not until next fall when you’re gearing up for NaNo. (I’ll be re-reading it then, too.)

The End

And so it comes to an end.

The last 5000 words were almost physically painful. I ran out of story before I ran out of words. In a real world setting, the difference between 48000 words and 50000 probably wouldn’t be that big a deal, but dammit I wanted 50000!

So I went back to the beginning and started editing/adding. But it felt like every time I added something, I cut another bit. Finally at 49,200 words I said ‘screw it’ and went back and gave my main character and his love interest an explicit love scene.

If I were ever to try to make this into a sellable novel I’d clip that bit out since it doesn’t really fit in with the tone of the story, but then I’m sure in the course of editing the whole thing I’d make a lot of additions and changes and who knows where the word count would end up.

But I wanted to hit 50K today. I got out of bed, started writing, and aside from 1 or 2 very brief breaks, I’ve been sitting here every since (its almost 4 now). I just NEEDED to finish!

I wish I hadn’t had to go cheap with the sex scene, though. But oh well. I need to get up and stretch. 🙂

Another light night

Did a lot of chores on the way home from work, so got a late start. And I still have some things to do around the house; basically I’m trying to get the weekend free for one last big push.

Still, I broke the 40K barrier. And, amazingly, I think I have just enough story left to carry my through to 50K.

I’m really going to do this, dammit. I’m fucking amazed…

Tough night.

Tonight wasn’t easy. First of all, I was exhausted when I got home so I laid down for a minute and the next thing I know it was 8 pm, so I started late. And I had a lot of distractions on my mind. Some pleasant, and some not. A friend of mine is having a tough time in her relationship right now and I’m a bit worried about her.

So the words came slowly. And then suddenly I was writing a relationship between two of my characters and finally the floodgates opened.

Which makes me wonder if it’d be possible to outline a book, identify the scenes I needed, and then choose a scene to work on based on my mood or what’s on my mind?

A matter of habit

I had a lot of things I wanted to do tonight, and figured I wouldn’t get much writing done. Still I sat down now and then, out of force of habit. The laptop say there beckoning to me.

And I ended up getting some words down. Sweet.

Hitting 50K is going to be trickier than I thought, though. When the story was ‘broken’ it was broken because there was no way I could fit that story into 5oK. But the fixed story is rushing towards ‘The End’ a bit too rapidly. I don’t want to hit the end before I hit 50k!!

These are pretty artificial problems, of course. NaNo problems. I’ll work it out. There’s no sex in the story yet. I could layer in 10k words of pr0n easily!!! 🙂

Plot doctoring

After the weekend I’d found I’d written myself into a corner. So tonight I spent some time plot-doctoring by throwing ideas around with a friend, then sketching out a rough outline for the rest of the novel.

So not a lot of words tonight, but I accomplished more than what is shown by the word count.