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.

heh... reaching the end point..

<alcar> I don't THINK this one will be much more than 50K; reaching burnout :P
<kentari> dude
<kentari> eyes are turning into maggots
<kentari> you burned out a long time ago
<alcar> lol!
<kentari> you're at the stage where you're like.. falling, in flames, through the atmosphere
<kentari> The question is whether or not you'll burn away before you smash into the earth's crust upon re-entry :P
<Chaos`^> yeah
<Chaos`^> i agree with ken
<Chaos`^> you burned out
<kentari> You should write no more
<kentari> including irc
<kentari> Since its words :P
<alcar> eh, shall be done Monday I think. Or Tuesday. It's a fun nano, though very, very odd.
<Chaos`^> just sit there and watch ken and i have a fun conversation
<Chaos`^> don't touch the keyboard!

Weird nano reality...

Well.

A friend of mine just presented me with some scary statistics. As of this moment, I've done 10% of the region's word count. And 1.47% for the entire province of BC.

This is a trifle astounding. And just a little frikken scary :p

It seems I lied.

nanowrimo #2 is going to be something else altogether. Mostly a modern end of the world tale from the antagonist's pov and involve aliens, messiahs, time travel and a host of odd and fun and silly things. The sequel to nano #1 may get written, just not for nano -- for me, what drives nano is doing things I have not done before. A sequel isn't quite the same as that, so it just wasn't jelling as well.

Shall see where this idea takes me.

If my brother reads this, yes, one character IS named Jesse.

And he probably will die. Several times. (He starts out the novel having died recently, after all.) But he gets better.

And Nanowrimo #1 is done!

62,857 words. I expected 70,00-80,000 so that's not too bad. I always add upwards of 5,000 on second drafts (adding in descriptions etc.) so it should end up 70K in total, and it's missing a scene or two in current version, such as the hangman's beautiful daughter only showing up once. Plus there should have been another conversation between Vernon and Taechan, but that can all wait until draft 2.


Nanowrimo #2 will be a sequel to #1, set 3 years later. The MC is less shy, the new king is doing a decent job in power, the vampire is back .... oh, yes, and there is a serial killer loose in the capital of the Kingdom. It's going to be thriller rather than mystery and, as a rarity in my novels, have actual chapters! I'm not quite sure how it ends up, but a lot of the back story of the characters comes into play a little more and old choices comes back to haunt people and they move onward with their lives.

It won't have as much comedy and be darker, but it's all fun and games. I think. All in all, it's going to be fun. And that's what matters.

33,000 words ...

And the king is dead! So now the actual plot, the mystery aspect of who killed the king, comes into play.

So far things have gone well, if strange. The comedy aspect has been less than I'd have hoped, but the first scene that came to me for the novel did work, and was comedy, so I'm happy with *that* at least. Groundwork has been laid for a sequel, which is the first time I've ever done that. Both will stand on their own, of course, and I don't see going past two books, but at this point the second novel seems a sure bet, even if it will be a thriller rather than a mystery.

Now all I have to do is get the MC to actually start speaking to people, and things will be good.

Nanowrimo musing of the day...

I imagine blinding a guard with a bag containing manure and the remains of a princess is a *definite* social faux pas.

Some nano thoughts ...

In some ways, it should be National Novel Writing Marathon. A fact that some people tend to forget. Writing 1700 or so words a day isn't hard; if one brackets 3 hours for writing a day it's probably easy.

What kills people is focus. You need to focus to get the writing done, if only to "write 10 minutes, relax 10" or some other system that works. Finding the system can take time,but following through with it is essential. Writing a novel IS fun, but it's also work.

And, really, that pretty much sums it up. So this break is over. Back to writing.

Ah, nanowrimo..

This year is different. Each year, I do try something new (be it an experiment in word count, doing 2 nanos, genre etc.). This year is comedy murder mystery set in an early renaissance. I have never done either genre before.

I haven't actually been nervous before doing nano before, and this is year five. So I take this as a good thing, and remind myself that at least I'm not trying my original idea of a haiku murder mystery, because that WOULD be insane.

This is just research heavy, on topics I used to know little about.

I also want it to be November first. Now :)

The back cover copy/burb/precis/whatever it is

I did one back in may (when looking at unicorn tanks started my bookmarks folder for the novel), but it seems to be about a novel I shall never write now. Writing the back cover blurb before you have any idea about the characters is amusingly silly :) I do remain fond of the line: "That's what I always believed, until I heard the stories: a woman in the city, who can make the dead speak, who leans over the newly deceased and listens to the tales their bodies tell her. "


As for the blurb proper ...

Here is the short version: "An apprentice coroner in the Kingdom has to survive his employer, investigating the deaths of dragons, zombies, and royalty, and various people who want to kill him for being too good at his job. All Adwyn wants is to not end up being the subject of an autopsy, and to go home and tell his father that his character-building advice really sucked."

And the long version:

"There are many things that make someone a man: being shipped off to the capital of the Kingdom to be a coroner is probably not one of them most people would think of. Dealing with a boss who goes through apprentices like the king goes through food tasters is almost as bad as being dragged about to see dead bodies as she stares at you the same way she looks at corpses, waiting for something she never names.

Throw in the hangman's beautiful daughter, dead dragons, zombies that have to be questioned to find out how they died, dead princesses, other royal deaths and more suspects than anyone would like to think about and you have what may be the worst apprenticeship in the dubious history of coroners in the Kingdom, especially when people decide you're too good at your job.

Adwyn hadn't been sure what to expect when his father packed him off to the city, but having people try and murder him for doing too good a job hadn't been on the agenda. If he survived, he was definitely going home and and giving his father a long lecture on the dangers of being the best that you can be. But, really, he'd settle for not being a corpse his mentor gets to perform an autopsy on, if that's not too much to hope for?"

And, after November is done, I shall see how close to the novel it really was :)

Nano 2007 plotting...

aka, great fun, The subplot involving the death of the king had ballooned into a massive plot involving at least 5 people who honestly believe *they* killed the king, the real killer and 2000+ words of notes and genealogy. I suspect it's going to be the latter half of the novel, with the first half being the MC learning how to be a coroner and growing up a little as he deals with the weird things on the job, falls in love, and learns some secrets about coroners and meets the only practitioner of real magic in the city.

The mystery aspect is great fun and convoluted and very, very silly. I can understand the appeal of writing a pure mystery novel, though I doubt I ever would since weirdness would creep into it. Somehow.