Nano 2009, day 3

Day 3 of nano. So far, right hand is sore but doing mostly OK. I'm taking a lot of breaks with it and writing hopefully 5K/day as my eventual average over several hours to cut down on any soreness.

Plus wise, things proceed rather well. I have a couple more chapters for Cody and Jesse before I run out of actual written down plot. (This isn't all that much, one chapter note was, in its entirety, "Chapter 7: Saunders/Burke chapter here, presumably in New Dysonville.") So far this version of the story has very little in common with the previous 2007 draft. Characters are somewhat the same, but Jesse has a little more spine and Cody hasn't yet gone over to the dark side, as it were. Soonish, but not yet.

A few additions have managed to surprise me, and the dynamic between Saunders and his boss is quite entertaining to work with. The downside to the plot as it stands now is that, going into the second day of the novel, the characters are liable to be captured by the authorities pretty soon. Shall see how that goes :)

Nano so far..

10K, 1 day into it. So far the plot is working as planned, though it's hard to get into the Jesse sections as easily as the Cody ones. A few subplots have surprised me, and I'm almost at the end of the actual written plot; after this it's build on what came before, seat of pants writing and know what the ending is so I cam move towards it.

Should be great fun. So far the best unplanned bit was the time traveller who is currently having a pouty fit because the FBI have him on the most wanted list for crimes he hasn't committed yet. Which, as far as he is concerned, is a) rude of his future self and b) discrimination.

When

When you forget me I want to know
what you remember, what you'll carry on
in forgetting of you
and me.

If I forget you I still would keep
Letters I wrote, the desk I wrote on
dreaming about you
and me.

We can still lose each other
in a world too connected; phones on
and off, silent you
and me.

(This post is for me)

A pair of otherwise distinguished physicists have suggested that the hypothesized Higgs boson, which physicists hope to produce with the collider, might be so abhorrent to nature that its creation would ripple backward through time and stop the collider before it could make one.

This is going into Draft2 of Roadside Attractions. Somehow.

The silence, it deafens.

So. Been busy, mostly working on the Family Story that was meant to be a pre-nano novella and now shows signs of wanting to keep going and becoming something Big. Naturally. I've no idea how long it will be at present.

Nanowise, the YA will be titled Shadows of Home. The trick will be keeping it YA and maybe doing a follow-up to it, depending on how it goes. After nano, I'm undecided. I have many, many projects from this year I can fix/continue, but the writing-group edited Roadside Attractions at the End of the World is waving at me again. I suspect the second draft will bear almost no resemblance to the first, since I'll be ditching most of the comedic-for-its-sake aspects and making it a far darker story overall. Which means tossing the aliens out the window and having Jesse's GF interact with him. I scratched out a few notes regarding overall goals, and I think the first two chapters will remain roughly the same, event-wise, but a lot of the over the top aspects of the later chapters will be discarded.

Protagonists

I was thinking about the Story so far. As it stands, Darnell is mostly reactive. He's tossed into situations and acts to solve them. By the standard of who is sets the actual plots in motion and gets things rolling, the antagonists fit the bill. The main character is, at present, almost the antagonist.

The antagonist is partially responsible for the plot, definitely responsible for moving it forward. That Darnell doesn't know this is only good to a point. Be interesting to see where this goes.

Family Story bit.....

"You don't pay attention to your own past?"
"Our stories are almost all oral; they change as we do, or at least the ones we emphasize do. It's not all that important, Kate. The world is, we are. That's enough for me."
Kate eyed me askance. "I can't tell if that's zen or if you're just lazy."

A nice fun bit from today. 20K into the story and dealing with various implications of Darnell having to inform people he's known that he isn't human. Or, in other words, the Superman/Lois Lane moment of truth: if someone lied to you ever since you knew them (no matter how short that time) could you trust them again? It's a fun concept to explore.

Ah, fun!

Working on the Family Story (it has a different title, but that was mostly to give it a title). Edited and fixed chapters 1-2 (3 was left pretty much as is), trashed the start of chapter 4 and now working on it. I'm not sure how long this story will end up being -- most of the major cast has been introduced or mentioned (or inferred, in one case). I've never working on a story from a non-human pov before in depth, so it's going to be fun when his morals and that of the humans he gets to know clash.

Interestingly for one of my writing projects, I am 10K into the second treatment and no one has been killed yet.

Fun Editing

So. I am working on a novella, mostly to take my mind off of my NaNoWriMo idea. The first scene came into my head. I wrote it, paused to write three pages of notes to find out what I was writing, continued. Ironically, the continued part flowed better with people so I am probably scrapping/moving the first scene util later and altering the plot as a result. On the plus side, later chapters will likely remain as written (chapter 3 needs almost no editing, plot-wise), but the start becomes pedestrian and the reader doesn't start in the middle of things quite as insanely as originally happened.

All of which means that this project is suffering the same result of all other things I've worked on this year. Get to point X, stop, redo from start. It's not necessarily a bad thing (I think it's better overall) but from a "So, what did I finish this year?" pov it's pretty annoying. I think I've reached a point where I need to plot out an idea a lot before I start writing it, more for an idea of who/what the characters are than with regards to the plot itself. Along with what characters are necessary and what their function is in and of themselves, not just for purposes of plot/story. I think I'll re-tackle Exorcism after nano with a better handle on the secondary characters.

Shall see how it all goes. Now back to rewriting chapter one of the Family story...

Ending this blog

I don't think I can combine the posts from this blog into my regular one, so just ending this blog. I don't post enough to either to justify having two. All nano, attempts as humour etc. posts will just be part of the normal blog.