Endings and Beginnings

I'm back! NaNoWriMo is over, and I'm here with my report.

I did not make it to 50,000 words. I made it to just over 35,000. That is not to say that I came away with nothing. Even if I never turn this draft into a proper book, that doesn't mean it was wasted.

I have learned a valuable lesson about myself. Even if I can't describe a setting, or a character, or world build worth shit, my god, can I kill people. It's like time slows down and I can detail every moment of their demise. There's a procedural cop show, I've forgotten which one, CSI or Bones or something, where it does this interior simulation of arteries getting severed and whatnot? It's like that.

So I killed Steve fifteen times, and rendered each one in beautiful detail, but at no point mentioned what he looked like. That's how I roll.

Hiatus 2018

I'll be going on hiatus for the remainder of November. I'm just busy trying to finish my novel in between working.

I'll be back in December with a post-NaNo report.

Putting Things in Boxes

This probably has very  little to do with my NaNo novel, which I have, by the way, finally given a name. Its still-entirely-changeable-but-at-least-looking-like-a-title title is Graver Mistakes, which is from the Coheed and Cambria song "Neverender." I don't know if it makes sense for this story, but we're going with it.

The other day, I was stalling and putting off novelling, and started a list of stories I've written (or at least first drafted), and their respective genres. I'm trying to find my niche, I guess. I want to see if there's something I tend to gravitate towards.

Right now, there are twenty-one stories on the list.

Death and Romance

Yes, I skipped last week. I'm sorry. I had a lot going on. It was all Halloween/beginning of NaNo/having to work on my day off, and I realized sometime on Sunday that I never wrote my post. But that's fine. I didn't have much to talk about then anyway.

So now I'm a few thousand words in, and this story is taking turns I never expected. My initial thought was that Steve was just some hapless oaf who got killed repeatedly in gruesome ways. But now all of a sudden he's a mentally ill grave robber with possible aspirations of being a superhero and I don't know what's happening anymore. Oh, and there's a love interest?

What started as some easy, jokey series of unfortunate events has turned into something else entirely.

Mystical Murder Weapons

Here is my problem when it comes to prep work and anything involving research. I go to look up one thing, and two hours later I'm reading about martyrdom and the Fisher King. That's one of many reasons why it takes me so long to write my blog posts.

I was trying to research the Spear of Longinus (aka the Spear of Destiny, or the Holy Lance). I was trying to figure out what happened to Steve to cause him all the trouble he's about to experience. I'm inclined to think that whatever kills him first has something to do with it.

Night of the Living Steve

Oh, Steve. Poor, poor Steve.

I'm going to murder him. Repeatedly.

The question is, of course, why? I can write his unfortunate demise in fifty different ways, but I need some kind of narrative framework to hold it all together. How has Steve found himself in this situation? Why is this happening to him? How is he going to get out?

Previously, I've said, on at least two occasions, that he's been cursed by an angry god. But unless I do some work and really flesh that out into something, it just ends up being "just because." As in, these things are happening to him because it's convenient for the purposes of story writing. It's not a good reason. And a good reason for him getting into this pickle is going to be instrumental in getting him out. I mean, how do you appease an angry god?

Squiggly Lines

Here's what I've been up to lately. I built a fire of creativity, and I stuck every iron I had into it. I have this new story I'm planning for November, and I have at least three old stories I'd like to revise. I have all this stuff, and I'm not really doing anything with anything on a daily basis.

I need to pick one project and go with it. My next NaNo novel is the obvious choice. Everything else can wait until December. Cold Blooded (the vampire one) will probably be the first revision project, because it has the most usable material to work with. After that is done (yes, done, not just half-done and abandoned), then The Long Road (the road trip one) and Cape Nowhere (the Victorian X-Files one) can get their chance.

But in order to make any of these stories really work, I'll need to do some planning.

Mostly Dead

It always happens that I'll be in the midst of one project, and already I'm thinking about the next. At the moment, I'm supposed to be plotting my upcoming NaNo novel, I haven't even started it, and instead I'm thinking about revision.

It's been brought to my attention that my 2016 vampire NaNo novel, Cold Blooded, is not half bad. It's readable, even. So it might be prudent for me to try to revise that one, as opposed to The Long Road, which still needs most of a plot.

Now, I haven't reread Cold Blooded in a while. I'm not sure if I've read it since I finished the first draft. But I remember it being a lot of fun to write. I did a lot of research on vampires in various works of fiction, picking out the attributes that I wanted to use.

Reading is Fundamental

I haven’t done a ton of writing lately. I've actually been doing some reading.

Most recently, in that's it's ongoing, I've read Hank Green's An Absolutely Remarkable Thing. I started it last night, and I'm almost done with it. It. Is. Fantastic. Narratively, it's fascinating. It has a habit of telling you about things before they come up in the story, but it doesn't make it any less exciting when it does come up. Like, something will be mentioned, and it piques your interest, and you want to know what on earth that's about. Then it gets to that point, and it's still all, "Oh shit! That happened!" I'm explaining this terribly. But it’s fucking great. And it includes all these elements of modern culture, like the internet and social media, that makes it all seem kind of… possible.

Seriously, if you are a fan of… books that are good, read it.

The other thing I read recently was not a book. Not a real one. Not a complete one. I had opened it up when I was looking for excerpts for my last post. It's Cape Nowhere, my 2012 NaNo novel.

Finding a Voice

Sorry there was no post last week. I had a lot going on.

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Narrative voice. That's why we're here today.

I'm sure I've talked about this before, but A) I'm too lazy to verify that, and B) it's an ongoing problem, so it bears repeating.

What I mean is the voice that the narrated bits (not the dialogue bits) are in. If you're writing in first person, then that's one of your characters. Otherwise, it's just this nebulous narrator figure. But just because they don’t have a body or a face doesn't mean that they don't have a personality and a voice.

My problem lies in the fact that my narrative voice tends to have no personality. It's just this flat, clinical description. And when it's not, then it's… wrong. Like a lack of cold professionalism is childish.