On Family Structure

Upon preparing the second draft of volume 1 (Contact), I realized that I'd made a few screw ups.
A) All the MCs (Emma, James and Leo) are only children and
B) Theyan ll come from two-parent families.

The former was authorial laziness, the second just odd. So I began to alter things:

Leo now has an older brother studying 'university' who will show up later in the novel. Parents remain together.

Emma remains an only child, though her dad died when she was an infant, mom has run the store etc. mostly on her own in the past few years. (I was able to figure her mom out perfectly, and never did get a handle on her father, so figured it was best to jettison him.)

James ends up with a younger sister (Caroline), his parents being divorced [in lieu of his mother having died a few years ago] and a younger half-brother, the latter of whom will show up. His mom's parents won't show up now, however. At least, I don't think so though I will at least have them mentioned.

Midpoint-ish update

Just hit 100,000 words overall. 30K in 6 days on Dogs of War. Not as much as I'd like -- or planned to do -- but I have to do just under 5K a day to hit the goal, so over 6K a day for a few days isn't all that bad. It is going slower than I planned, but I think some of that is a factor of having a real outline: I large know what is going to happen already, so while I still get some surprises while writing it out, the general plot isn't going to do a giant swerve and have me writing to find out what happens next.

Also managed to toss another $20 to nanowrimo via paypal (I was just lucky to have some money in it at all), so that was nice. Now for a break and then - onward!

nanowrimo - titles!

Nanowrimo #1 is now going to be called The Empty Book. It's a horror story about a man named Brodie who learns the true nature of the world following an attempt at suicide and gets involved with the wars of magicians, angels, demons entirely against his will. It is emphatically not a feel-good book in my head.

Nanowrimo #2 is an urban sci-fi story involving a small town in northern Ontario and alien invasion of earth. The plan is for a trilogy called Dogs of War. The first book will be Contact and be about three high school students and their encounters with aliens, being altered by (other) aliens. It's going to be about war and religion and the sacrifices made on all sides. It will, however, have more humour than the first nano.

Word-wise, I am hoping to do two 80K nanoes this year.

nanowrimo #2 chosen :p

And doing Dogs of Wars as Nano #2. To summarize: "Aliens arrive to convert humanity; another alien species alters 3 humans (and a park) to fight them."