NaNo 2020 Review

So I've made it through NaNoWriMo. I did not win. And just for anyone not familiar with NaNo, "winning" just means you wrote 50,000 words. You get a PDF certificate that says you won. It's not a competition where your work is judged. You don't get your book published. You just have a whole bunch of words that you wrote, that you can edit into something better, if you want to. It's a challenge, not a competition.

Anyway, I didn't write 50,000 words. I wrote 33,007. Honestly, not bad. Some of it was not complete crap. But more importantly, I learned a valuable lesson.

I am not a pantser.

It's All Relative

Instead of writing for hours today, I got distracted with trying to figure out how various characters were related. It matter to the plot, I'm not just being crazy.

This is what I have created:

It's not entirely filled in, because not everyone matters. But I needed to know how two characters (the dark blue boxes) were related. Because my characters can't figure it out if I don't know.

It's Fine, Everything Is Fine

So the first week of NaNoWriMo is over. I'm behind schedule. Big surprise there. I guess Past Me had more initiative to sit down and write 50,000 words, and I just don't have that anymore.

Anyway, there's still plenty of time to catch up. It's fine. Assuming I get my shit together.

I've tentatively titled the book The Light in the Dark. You might ask, what does that mean? I'm not entirely sure. I'm hoping that will become clear as I write. It comes from Takida's The Artist, and just seemed like it would mean something in the context of the story.

Secrets of a Small Town

So here I am trying to plot out this new idea. As mentioned last time, there were a series of real life deaths that lack a satisfying explanation. I'm going to fictionalize them and give the story a proper conclusion. 

But. These three deaths are the only thing I know about the story. I can do literally anything with the rest of the narrative. Is this realistic fiction, or is something supernatural afoot? Who are the other characters? Who is trying to solve the mystery? Who is trying to keep the mystery from being solved? I have no idea, and the possibilities are endless. 

I've created a thought-dump document, where I am just putting anything and everything that could fit into this story. I have a vague idea about a main character. There may be a love interest (for once), and I am resisting the urge to kill them off. 

Trying to Make a Comeback

Would you believe that I fully thought I had posted something in September? I'm not sure how I've gone from twice a week to every other month, but here we are. 

I know a lot of it is due to my lack of motivation to write. It's hard to talk about the projects I'm working on when I'm not making any progress on them.

Then, at some point, I went from working on a series of projects to slowly slogging away on just one. I've largely stopped working on other things because I'm supposed to be writing this vampire novel. But then I'm not really working on that either. See, working on lots of different rough drafts actually got me somewhere, because it was just writing. It didn't have to be good. It was just about getting words on the page. But with Cold Blooded, I'm writing for an actual audience who will actually read it with their actual eyeballs. So it has to be… perfect. I can't just go down a rabbit hole of a plot tangent, because it might not work out, I'll have to backtrack and fix everything, and I'll have wasted my time. So I'm making an outline of all the scenes before I sit down and write anything. But it has holes in it. And I don't know what goes in those holes. So I stare at it and wring my hands and I don't do anything. 

And it doesn't help that old stories keep getting stirred up in my head.

• A show about a coastal town where weird things happen makes me want to fix my 2012 NaNo novel about… a coastal town where weird things happen.

• A song about a soldier home from war almost inexplicably gave me an idea for my 2014 Camp NaNo YA novel about an evil carnival.

Add to that a new idea that I'd like to tackle for NaNoWriMo this year, in which I remedy a gross injustice perpetrated by reality itself. That is, a series of deaths under mysterious circumstances that never found a satisfying explanation. The official story is that there was no sinister meaning behind them, but I believe otherwise. They have to mean something. And so, through the power of fiction, I intend to base a story on these deaths, and create a narrative around them that means something. 

So yes, that means I'm setting Cold Blooded aside for now. Just for a little while. I think it will be good. As illustrated above, I always get ideas for the story I'm not working on. 

And maybe, just maybe, I'll manage to post more regularly while I embark on this new project.

I'll see you… soon?

Ideas and Index Cards

Here I am, skipping whole months again. I took a bit of a break from writing. I didn't even do Camp NaNoWriMo in July.

But what I did do, was buy a corkboard.

Beginning at the End

Sorry, I completely skipped May. I thought I'd done a blog post more recently, and apparently I was wrong. I hadn't had much to say because I wasn't making any progress on the novel.

Until now.

So, I've figured out the climax of the story. I had this vague idea about it, but I didn't know where it was, or how the characters got there, or how they got out once it was over. But I've got it now. And to be honest, it was kind of obvious. Maybe it's cliched, but we're going with it anyway. It's much better than nothing.

See, I've been trying to outline this book from the beginning. I have most of Act 1 (the first quarter) plotted out, and the beginning of Act 2. Then it's just the major plot points with a lot of empty space around them.

In Between the Murders

Here we are at the tail end of Camp NaNo: April Edition. I took a nice break from my vampire novel and wrote something completely different. I set myself a nice, easy little goal of 2,000 words, just to get me writing, not to stress me out. I ended up with over 4,000 words. A tiny victory.

It was just a little half-baked story about time travel, but it did make me realize something important. I had the basic setup in place, and I had an idea for something that would happen, you know, later. Like, there would be other things, and I would build character relationships naturally over the course of these things. And then when I got to the later thing, it would be more… not just sensical, but more satisfying. Like we earned it. But I got bored and skipped over all the in-between things, and then the big scene was just lacking in… stuff.

Still Here

I realize it's been a while since I posted. But I am still here, and still working on this same damn story.

I know a lot of people out there have been staying home and finding themselves with an abundance of free time. But, lucky me, I have a job deemed "essential" that can't be done from home, so I still have to go to work and have exactly the same amount of free time.

I have been working on Cold Blooded, off and on. I'm still trying to outline the whole thing so I don't write myself into a corner later on. I have the plot laid out, scene by scene, up to the first murder and a little bit after. But then some, like, other stuff needs to happen before the second murder. Like, more setup, character building stuff.

I just haven't felt very motivated, so progress has been slow. It's now Camp NaNo: April Edition, and I have decided to work on something else. I'm not sure what, but I need to get out of the novel for a little while and try to find the joy in writing again.

I'm never going to get rich off my stories, so I might as well enjoy them.

I'm kicking around the idea of time travel. I haven't written a time travel story since 2011. Maybe it's time (ha HA!) to have another go at it. Maybe that'll be November's novel. I don't know.

But I'm still here. Still writing. Or trying to.

I'll see you… well, I'll see you.

More Stuff Here

My post-it note outline for Cold Blooded is going pretty well. I've been having ideas, filling in blanks, figuring shit out. It's also making me a bit nervous.

There are points at which Des' new human friends find out what he is (a vampire, if you're just joining us). The first (friend A) was a few scenes before the midpoint, and the second (friend B) was at the midpoint. I moved friend A's discovery a little later, to the midpoint. Then what about friend B? Oh, I moved that a quarter of the book earlier to the First Plot Point.

And this concerns me. Like this plot is a precarious Jenga tower and if I move the wrong piece, the whole thing is going to come crashing down. I had briefly considered Friend B not finding out at all, and now I pull this shit? What am I doing?

When Inciting Is Not Exciting

I'm starting to wonder about my inciting incident. Is it the thing I think it is?

I've seen many times that in a murder mystery, the Inciting Incident is when someone dies, or the body is discovered. So that's where I had it.

And then the First Plot Point is when the main character is irreversibly pulled into the adventure.

The thing is, my first murder doesn't really… affect anything? It happens "off screen" and the main characters hear about it via a news alert. It creates a bit of atmospheric tension (just the tiniest bit), and fewer people are going out and buying ice cream.

And then my First Plot Point was where the main character ends up getting involved. He gets in a direct confrontation with this serial killer. And then he discovers a body. Now things are starting to happen. I think. That's where I left off.

Purposeful Wandering

When I started my revision adventure, I made a list of all the scenes in Cold Blooded. Then I went through and marked all the ones the were important, and the ones that weren't. Scenes that needed to stay vs scenes that needed to be cut.

A lot of the scenes at the beginning that were marked for deletion involved main character Des just… wandering around. Like, he'd walk around town, or around the college campus, and he'd run into people and have awkward conversations and leave. Nothing really important was happening, so I declared that we needed to skip all that.

And because of that, my beginning is very sparse at the moment, as I have yet to figure out what else should go there to fill out the world and the characters and the plot.

Then I had a sudden realization the other day. The wandering was not for nothing. It was important. Des goes wandering around town and around campus because he's looking for a connection. Not that he'd know what to do with it if he found it. Like a dog chasing a car. He wants to go out and be a person and make friends. But when he actually encounters people, the reality that he's a weirdo vampire coming off of a period of near-total isolation comes crashing down and he has to make his exit.