I have meant to write this post since the beginning of
December, but kept getting distracted by, you know, things. This is just one of
three or four projects I've just not done this month. So don't feel
special. I'm neglecting everything equally.
So.
Let's talk about my NaNoWriMo novel, the rewriting of Cold
Blooded.
In the end, it was not 50,000 words. It clocked in at
36,153. Which might not seem like a lot, but of the past five years, when I
have not reached 50K, this one has the most words. Fun Fact: The last time I
did reach 50K was 2016, with the first version of Cold Blooded.
Despite knowing there was very little chance of actually
reaching 50K in such a short amount of time, I still went all out on the last
day and managed to write 5,450 words on November 30th. If I could just write
that many every day, I'd be set. At that point, my goal was less to hit the
word count goal, and more to just get to the end of the story. So I wrote the
entire Third Act in one day. Which, yes, means Act Three (which should be a
quarter of the book) is only 5K words long. But that's fine. It's a rough
draft.
Now, stats. You know how much I love stats.
This was one of the bloodier stories I've written to date.
We have 116 uses of the word "blood" and variations thereof. Just
what you'd expect for a vampire story. We also have 10 deaths, making this
possibly1 the highest number of distinct2 deaths.
The word "fuck" is used 91 times. That's 20 more
occurrences than the 2016 version of the story, despite being 14,000 words
shorter. I think that's just a testament to how much more vulgar I've become in
the past few years.
So, what have we got out of this experience?
As I said, this is still a rough draft. Yes, it's technically
the second draft, but because I changed so many things from the first draft,
this was literally a brand new story written from scratch rather than a
revision. So it's a whole new rough draft.
Back in 2016, I pantsed the whole thing. Made it up as I
went. This time, I had a whole outline. All of the basic scenes were on my
corkboard. But one thing I noticed when I was actually writing it was that the
characters did not always react as intended. Not to do that whole "my
characters do what they want and I have no control over them lol!" thing.
More like, I had a notecard that said something like "Character X finds a
body" and that was all it said. Just a fact. Just a thing in the course of
the plot that happens. But I found that when I went to write it, Character X
would actually have a reasonable human reaction and totally not be okay with
dead bodies, and completely derail the chill vibe I had going in the scene. So
I'll need to change some things to accommodate that.
I also know that I need a lot… more. More characters. More
interesting places around town. Just more. As I said, Act Three was only
5K words long. Definitely need more in there.
I'll need to read it over again, but I don't think there's
too many actual plot holes. I mean the places where I am like, "I don't
know why or how this is happening." There are a couple, but they will be
solved when I add More™. Like, there's at least one point where a character
needs to be in a place, and I'm just not sure why that's a place where they normally
go. Yet.
If I want to publish this book, it will need to be about 80K
words long, which you might notice is over twice what I have now. So I have a
lot of work ahead of me.
Oh, and if you're wondering why this draft is so much
shorter than the first one, it's because the 2016 draft had a lot of
bullshit filler in it. You know, for the word count. But I cut a lot of that
out when I was outlining for the new draft.
Anyway, I just wanted to get the post out so that I could
say I didn't skip December. And like I said, I've been meaning to write this
all month. I've been taking a little break for writing before I start trying to
plan some kind of revision, but I should be back at it before long. Hopefully.
I'll see you next time.
1. I say "possibly the highest" because I don't
remember how many people I killed in some of my earlier novels.
2. By distinct, I mean separate people, not the same people multiple times due to time loops or immortality (looking at you, Steve).
No comments:
Post a Comment