Wednesday, November 28, 2007

And the end of nanowrimo for 2007...

Final wordcounts: "The Coroner's Tale" at 62,857 and "Roadside Attractions at the End of the World" at 50,314 for a grand total of 113,371.

And that's all she wrote for this year. I did discover what happened in 2004 happened now: Sometime after 100K I just burn out, badly, and have to force the words out for a few days at a pace of ~250-500/hour at best. (My normal rate is about 1000/hour). It didn't matter that I liked Nano #2 - I did - it's just that it was simply getting to be too much.

As for the results....

Coroner made for an interesting twist with forensics and a murder mystery, and the latter was awesome fun to plot out but the former was a lot of work, and took a lot of time (and money, in terms of buying books). I plotted out Coroner the month before or so, having a rough outline of what happened to a point (the dragon death) and then pretty much winging the murder mystery aspect based on who would be interviewed and such.

Roadside, by contrast, had a plot consisting of a couple of hours, tops, writing up basic notes and characters. I only plotted to the second chapter and only plotted 1-2 chapters ahead at a time at best. Since I'd set each chapter at ~2K, this made for an interesting experiment. I found that I loved writing out chapter headings, but hated doing chapters.

All in all, though, I'm happy with the result. They'd both need to be longer in a second draft, especially since we never learn much about Jesse's sister, or his family at all beyond her.

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