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. 

More Stats for the Stats God

Surprise, it's me again!

I was doing some thinking about the genres I typically write, and I realized something. My spreadsheet of story stats (which includes things like Point of View used, number of deaths, times "fuck" is used, etc.) does not include one seemingly obvious aspect: genre.

So I've set about correcting that, only to find it's harder than I thought. Is a ghost story paranormal, supernatural, or horror? What about a weird, unearthly carnival? Or a seemingly normal object that does a weird thing?

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.

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.