Structured Spontaneity

All right, it's the post NaNo Wrap Up!

I meant to post during November, but got kind of overwhelmed trying to write the novel itself. But now it's over, so here we are.

Bottom line, I wrote 50,000 words. 50,148, to be exact. Goal accomplished. So let's talk about it.

Plotting vs. Pantsing
For December's Problem, I went in with a particular plan. The idea was that the general plot arc would be planned out, and the details along the way would be randomly generated. This worked, to a degree.

The plot was this: Our main character, December, would fall into a plot hole--a portal to a parallel world--and she would go on a Sliders-style adventure through different worlds, trying to A) get home, and B) fix whatever was causing the holes. Two main things were randomly generated: the genre, and the incarnation of her friend Steve. The genre was selected from a list of 20 different genres by rolling a 20-sided die, to give me things like Horror or High Fantasy. Steve was pulled from the Big Bag of Steves (or its digital version), giving me prompts like "Steve buys some fireworks" or "Steve has fat stacks of Argentinian Pesos."

This November, It's December's Problem

It's been a while, I know.

Off and on over the past several months, I've thought, "Oh, I should write a blog post." And then I didn't. I could say that I've been busy, that work and life got in the way. But really, I just haven't felt motivated. But now, on the eve of another NaNoWriMo, I think it's time for a comeback.

So what have I been up to?

In April, I rewrote part one of a "book" I wrote in 2017. It was a road trip through, essentially, the Twilight Zone. One day I'd like to make it work, but I was never really happy with the plot beyond that first part. Still don’t know where it's going.

In July, I tried my hand at an epistolary novel. That is, a story told via letters, journal entries, newspaper articles, etc. Turns out, I'm not very good at writing journal entries. I knew that. I've never been able to consistently keep a journal. Or, you know, a blog. I even thought about writing a blog post about it, but, well, I'm bad at that. I might try to work on that more eventually, because it was a fun idea. It was basically two people in a post-apocalyptic world, they get separated, and we follow the journal of one as they are following messages and clues left by the other.

But that is not what we are working on now.

Because now, or rather, in the very near future, it's NaNoWriMo.

In the Forest, Take Care...

We're doing something a little different today. I'd like to present something I put on Instagram recently. I want to share it here because it might be difficult to see all the pages if you don't have an Instagram account.

A cautionary tale about wandering in the woods.

Thinking About Writing

I haven't done a lot of writing lately. That's the short answer for why I haven't posted in a while.

I did write a piece of flash fiction (it's a couple hundred words, I think) that I'll be putting on Instagram eventually, but it requires some artistic steps before that's ready. I'd like to start writing more, again, but I have to actually work on making that a habit. Otherwise I think about doing it, but don't actually ever do it.