I'm Pushing an Elephant Up the Stairs

I'm back. And post Camp NaNo, too.

Initially, I had set a 10,000 word goal for the month. It seemed reasonable, a nice chunk of words to get Draft Two started.

But I got busy, and just… unmotivated, so I dropped the goal down to 5,000. Which I succeeded at writing. Not as nice of a chunk, but words are words.

And it was a lot harder than I thought it would be.

I thought that with my Draft One experience, and my handy new outline, the words would just flow and form a bigger, better version of the story. Not so. My 5,000 words were an exhausting slog through exposition and world building. You know, the boring shit I hate. I skipped a big chunk and didn't even introduce one character when I was supposed to because describing how the ice cream shop was set up was the most tedious piece of drivel I have ever attempted. There has to be a better way.

Falling Much Further Behind

I've had some sequel ideas lately, which might not seem super helpful right now, but it's actually helping me figure out how things should happen now, so they can happen a certain way later.

The downside of looking ahead is that I'm realizing just how many words I need to write and it's looking more and more impossible. To give you an idea of what I'm dealing with…

Assuming a finished length of 80,000 words, which is basically the low end of acceptable, that means a major structural beat occurs roughly every 10,000 words. So the first beat, The Inciting Incident, where shit starts to get weird after all the "normal world" set up, happens 10,000 words in.

I'm Writing a Book, I Swear

With the holiday and all, I kind of forgot I was supposed to write a post. So, sorry it's late.

I have commenced with the rewrite of Cold Blooded. I've been changing things from the first draft, right from the get-go. So some of the same things happen, but they happen differently. I think it's better?

Right now I'm in the midst of The Setup, the piece of world-building that occupies the first 11% or so, where we meet our main character and the normal world he lives in. And then we're going to shake it up when we get to the Inciting Incident at the 12% mark. But first we have to get there.

And my god, is it boring. I don't like how it's going. I don't like how I'm writing it. I kind of hate it. It's not fun and wacky and exciting like this story tends to be. It's just bullshit exposition. Here's a ice cream shop. Here's how it works. Here's some weird flavors.

Until We Have Faces

I nearly forgot to write a post this week, as my days off have been spent playing with larger scale murder than usual. I just got the game Plague Inc: Evolved on my computer and I'm trying to wipe out humanity with fungal spores. Mankind is surprisingly resilient.

So anyway, writing and stuff.

Camp NaNoWriMo starts on Monday. I'm super excited. Yeah, I realize I've been struggling with this dumb story for months, but I'm starting to feel it again. I've got my main character back in my head. He had become kind of nebulous and faceless (I’ll get into that in a second) and it was hard to actually get him to be in the scenes. But he has coalesced back into a solid form, and is behaving like a human (or nearly human) again.

A Glimmer of Hope

Guess what?

I have had the most important breakthrough in the nearly three year history of Cold Blooded. I have done something I feared I would never be able to accomplish.

I named my god damn town.
Here's the stupid thing:

Every time I tried to come up with a name, something popped into my head, and I said, "Yes, like that. But not that, because we can't call it that." Well, guess what, kids. We can call it that. And we are calling it that.

Names Are Hard

The July edition of Camp NaNoWriMo is coming up (in—plot twist—July) and I, of course, have started thinking about what project I want to do. My intention at the beginning of the year was to start brand new, short projects, as a break from toiling with my novel. But I haven't been doing a lot of toiling lately. In fact, the main thing I've been doing is fucking around. Every now and again I'll write down a thought that may or may not fit into the narrative somewhere. Things like, "Do vampires take fall damage?" and "How do we feel about accidental murder?"

So I think maybe I should use Camp NaNo as a kickstart to the actual novel writing, with the hope that daily word goals will get me going. The issue is that I was hoping to have a full outline before I started actually writing, for once. Which I do not yet have.

The Story Continues?

Sequels.

You might say, "Why are you talking about sequels when you haven't written a first book yet?" Because I like to get ahead of myself, that's why.

When I first imagined and wrote the rough draft of Cold Blooded in 2016, I was adamant about one thing. There would be no sequel. This was it. There was no other place for the story to go.

But. I may have been wrong. See, I have all these ideas that I thought of between the rough draft and now, that I thought I would integrate into the next draft. But a lot of them, well, there's just no place for them. I can't make them fit into this plot I already have.

What Does It All Mean?

I started this post like two weeks ago. Sorry it took me so long to finish. I've been busy.

So last time I mentioned Theme as part of the Holy Trinity of storytelling, along with Plot and Character. (This wasn't my idea, I got it from K.M. Weiland.)

Since the past two posts revolved around plot, and then character, it seems appropriate to tackle theme today. Trouble is, I don't really understand theme.

It's one of those things that make high schoolers hate English class. You can't just read a book. You have to deconstruct it, figure out all the symbolic subtext, and then write an essay on the underlying theme. It's this nebulous thing that seems pretty subjective, but your English teacher assures you that there is a right answer.

The Name Maketh the Man

I'm working on stuff, I swear. I'm just not making a ton of progress that would be exciting to hear about.

I've done a little bit on plot stuff since last time, mostly I've been figuring out character stuff. Like giving them names. And faces.

So in my rough draft of Cold Blooded, I gave the serial killer a name, but it only mentioned once, kind of after the fact, and I kept forgetting what it was. So I've given him a new name and started to figure out his place in the story.

The vampire hunter never got a name at all. Until now. And just by giving him a name, I've started to understand his background, and where he's coming from. It's like a jigsaw puzzle. It's all a big mess of pieces, but once you snap a couple into place, you start to see where the others go around it.

Screaming Fruit at Water

Right now I'm trying to lay out all of my scenes for Cold Blooded. I'm going to need a lot of them, judging by how long my scenes tend to be, and how long this book needs to end up. I'm talking like 80 scenes, which, frankly, seems like a shit ton. I'm basing this off of what I learned from this blog post. I tend to write very short scenes, probably because I refuse to describe anything that doesn't look like a crime scene. But that means I need about 10 scenes before I even get to the inciting incident. Or less, longer scenes. Either way, this is all just setup. For an 80,000 word book, I need about 10,000 words of setup. Does that sound boring? I think that sounds boring. But what do I know.

My system right now is just figuring out the basic progression of events. So I have three things to determine for each scene:

• What needs to happen? How is the plot going to be progressed in this scene? What characters and elements need introduced?
• Who needs to be there? Technically, this is who else needs to be there. As the novel is in 1st Person POV, the main character is there by default.
• What could go wrong? Not necessarily what will go wrong. Just because things could go sideways at a given moment doesn't mean they will. But I want to keep my options open.