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.