Only Dealing With Draft One Problems

Here we are, post-Camp NaNo.

Did I meet my writing goal? Yes.

Did I lower my writing goal to something I knew I could meet easier? Also yes.

But that's not the point. It's not cheating when you're allowed to change you goal. And the real goal was just to get started on this story. Which I did. I didn't finish it, but that's okay. I figured out some of the hows and whys that are going to make writing the climax easier.

I'm still going to have to do some heavy edits to the beginning, because, like I said last time, there's a lot of important stuff that's missing. So this was by no means going to come out of April a finished product. I think some of that is going to be solved by better figuring out the POV and voice of the story.

Dropping Some Plot Relevant Knowledge

Camp NaNo is… progressing. Very slowly. I'm not writing as often as I would like, but I am writing, so that's an improvement.

I'm maybe… 50 or 60% through the plot. Maybe. Depending on how long the climax and resolution takes. But we're headed in that direction.

Having not yet completed Draft One, I can already tell that I'm going to need to rewrite the beginning. There's a lot of information, like world building and backstory, that I have all figured out, and needs to be in there, that just… isn’t in there. Stuff like what sort of time period this is set in, and who these characters are and why they're doing what they're doing. You know, important stuff. I also spent a lot of time figuring out what kind of a ship they have, and that's just… never mentioned.

Setting Goals

Whoops, I started writing this in February and then forgot about it. What is time, anyway.

I plotted out about half of the short story I mentioned last time before realizing I wasn't quite sure how it ended. Or how it... climaxed. Then, quite suddenly, I realized the secret that had been eluding me (Sunlight! Windows!) and wrote out a chunk of important dialogue while I was supposed to be sleeping. So this thing is still afloat.

Untethered From the Dock

 All right. I've taken a nice little break, and I'm back.

Have I made progress on my vampire novel? Hahahaha! No. 

I have, however, had another idea. Probably more of a short story.

So here's what happened.

I was listening to a song. This song. And I said to myself, there's a story idea in this somewhere. I'm just not sure what it is. And then it occurred to me, after hearing the song, I don't know, 20 more times.

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?

Ideas and Index Cards

Here I am, skipping whole months again. I took a bit of a break from writing. I didn't even do Camp NaNoWriMo in July.

But what I did do, was buy a corkboard.