The Writing Will Continue

It's been a while. I know. I've been meaning to write this for months, but, well, you know how it goes. All of a sudden it's July and you haven't posted all year.

So, a few things. Number one, National Novel Writing Month is no more. I'm not going to get into the hows and whys, but basically the whole organization has collapsed. So there's no more official, organized, global novel writing event in November. That being said, they hardly had a patent on the concept of writing a lot in a short amount of time. Anyone can do it.

Back to the Future

So I wrote another novel.  You should be used to this by now. I've been doing it every year. This was a short one. A novelette, perhaps.

In the end, it was about 20,000 words, which is not the 50,000 word goal, but it is the goal I made for myself when I realized that I just didn't have the time to make the full goal. It also has a beginning, middle, and end, which is really all you can hope for. 

And now that it's done, I've gone through to gather the statistics that I'll compare to all my other stories.  You know, for fun. One of the things I calculate is the top five most used words, and the word "back" shows up in so many Top 5s. It will usually be character names, "said," and "back." People go back, turn back, look back… So I made a concerted effort to not use "back" in this one. So many times, I stopped myself from letting people lean back, reach back, give back… And how did I do? Well, I used "back" about 100 times in a 45 page document, so not well. It's in spot 4 in the Top 5. 

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.

The Real Treasure Was the Novel We Wrote Along the Way

All right, we're back for the post-NaNo wrap-up. I didn't mean to wait quite this long, but here we are. So… oh boy, where do I begin?

I guess I'll start with point of view, because that's what I talked about at the beginning of November. I did keep up the system of alternating between the two siblings (with a couple exceptions, I'll get to that in a bit). It was interesting to decide which point of view a scene should be told from. Some were obvious, because only one or the other was present, but some had both characters present, so it was not so clear. I did find that ending the chapter and switching POV in the middle of those scenes worked pretty well to give both perspective on whatever was going on.

But then there were a couple of scenes that really needed to be from a third POV, so there are also two short chapters that break the alternating pattern. They are from the POV of a character who can see the future. Which brings me to the next thing: tense. Now, I'd say the majority of fiction is written in past tense ("She baked a cake"). There are also books written in present tense ("She bakes a cake"), often Young Adult fiction. But you never really see things written in future tense ("She will bake a cake"). And what better time to try out future tense than in a chapter in the POV of a precognitive character? It was fun. I would definitely never write a whole book like that. But it was a very interesting thing to try. Especially as the future comes to them in a big jumble, and not necessarily in any order. It works fine for a short chapter, but would be infuriating (to both reader and writer) in a longer work.

The End... of NaNo 2022

At this moment, it's about 10:30pm on November 30th. And my NaNoWriMo document is currently sitting at 50,131 words.

That's right friends. After 5 years of not reaching 50k, I've done it.

There's more that I want to say about it. About, I don't know, the process and the things I've learned. I came in here intending to say all that. But I think I'll save that for next time. I wrote 7,500 words today. I can't write any more.

But I wanted to tell you all, I've done it.

I'll see you next time.

True, From a Certain Point of View

Well, it's November. Which means two things. One, I forgot about October. Whoops. Two, it's NaNoWriMo.

So last we… spoke, I had a pile of tropes and character traits and plot elements. Well, now I have a vaguely steampunk treasure-hunting action adventure with a search for a mysterious treasure hidden by a long-gone secret society. I'm actually pretty excited for it.

At this point, I'm not quite 2,000 words in. Barely beginning. But I'm on the second chapter and I already have something I want to talk about: POV.

For the uninitiated, that's Point of View. There's a lot of options for POV. 1st person vs. 3rd person (and yes, also 2nd person, but that's rarely used). Single vs. multi. Omniscient vs. limited vs objective. I'm not going to get into all the details of all the different kinds. Suffice it to say it's a matter of who we are following through the story, and how close we're following them.

Putting Plots in a Pile

I didn't do a lot of writing in August. Writing adjacent, sure.

What I did was read through my vampire novel-in-progress and list out what happened in each chapter and each scene. The purpose of this was to have a nice, easy to skim summary of the plot, because there are some scenes I need to rewrite. See, they were just hastily chucked in there as a means to an end. I needed to get from Point A to Point C and something had to be Point B. Just things like, I need this character to learn this piece of information, and these characters need to be over here for this next thing to happen. But I don't much care for them, so they're going to be changed. And I just wanted a nice overview so I could see how each change would cascade and affect later scenes.

So that was August. I mean, that was a few days in August.

But on to September.

Post-NaNo 2021

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.

NaNo Week One: A Progress Report

I am really nailing this flashback shit.

My outline has some less than helpful direction, like "reveal some backstory here." Useless. But here I am, just writing along, and somehow seamlessly sliding into the past based on something that's happening in the present.

I am so good at this.

And these were just the good flashbacks. *rubs hands together* *cackles maniacally* Just wait until we get into the Dark Flashbacks™.

Color-Coded For Your Convenience

I'm not going to forget to post in October. I'm going to sneak in at the very end of the month.

So where are we?

Oh right, I'm going to rewrite my vampire novel next month, and I'm woefully unprepared.

I've been trying to fill in some of the plot gaps with… something. And I've realized… not quite a solution, but perhaps a path to a solution. There are some characters that just disappear for big chunks of the book. This realization led me to go on a quest for my colored pencils at one in the morning, but I think I'm onto something.

Turning Backwards?

So, I forgot to write a blog post for a few months. Big surprise there. Honestly, I thought I had just written one, so it couldn't possibly be time for another. Time is meaningless.

How's the writing going, you might ask. A reasonable question. Surely I must have been doing something all this time.

Well, I have decided that I'm more than likely going to work on the second draft of Cold Blooded during NaNoWriMo in November, because maybe a deadline will help me keep going. So all I need to do is finish my outline between now and then, and I'll be all ready to go.

What's that? I have to actually work on my outline to finish it?

Oh. Oh no.

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?

For a First Effort This Feels Kind of Last Ditch

NaNoWriMo is over. Thank God. Did I reach 50,000 words? I did not. Is that okay? I guess.

My actual novel, the space story Wandering Star, ended at around 25,000 words. Not a good sign. Basically, I suddenly knew how it was going to end, but not anything else that happened before that, so I metaphorically steered that ship straight into the ground and brought it to the end.

Then I limped my way up to just past 34,000 by adding to a story I left unresolved three years ago, and then writing/starting several short stories based on some of the numerous writing prompts I have saved. My plan was to make up the 20,000 words I needed by writing at least 1,000 words on 20 different prompts. In like two days. One of which was Thanksgiving. So that was easier said than done. I think I ended up doing three different prompts, two of which are more or less complete little stories, and one of which is still in progress. It keeps taking turns I wasn't expecting and I'd like to see where it's going with this.

The Trouble With Triangles

Am I writing a romantic subplot?

I'm certainly not trying to. But it sort of seems like it's heading that way. Even though I'm trying to stop it.

Help me.

My resistance fighter chick is starting to get very touchy-feely with my space cop dude and I don't know what to do. I don't know if I can make her stop. She is very stubborn. Oh no. I can see where this is going. It might be inevitable.

Oh no.

This is not meant to be that kind of story.

Lost in Space

NaNoWriMo is underway and my god I am not prepared.

I told myself I wouldn't get behind again. I'm already behind. I've got all these ideas and somehow… no words.

Well, not no words. I have a few words. Some of them are ridiculous, and therefore, my favorite words.

Case in point, this piece of inspired literature:

The Captain of the Corps was a man of about fifty, with an authoritative moustache. Men would follow that moustache into hell itself. His name (the man, not the moustache) was Reginald Shepard. His friends called him Reg. His subordinates called him Captain. His moustache called him home.

Fucking amazing.