We’re almost halfway through November–but not quite!  NaNoWriMo is rocking right along for me.  I passed 20,000 words today, which puts me right on target.  Next week is particularly busy though, so I’m expecting to slip behind somewhat.  We’ll see.

So much for quantity, as to quality…I’m having a mixed NaNo.  There are some parts I’m writing that I like a lot.  I still like the premise and the world, and I’m discovering more about the world as I go.  But this is starting to feel more like very intensive world-building than noveling!  I’m writing scenes I can probably use in a final version and probably more or less in this order–but it’s still not coming together as tightly as I would like.  I feel like there’s a lot more that should be here, and I don’t know quite what it is yet–like I may not have just the right angle, or have the right scenes to tell the story I want.

So!  More clarity may emerge, or I may end up with a rougher first draft than has happened in some previous years.  Although with a brand new world to explore, I suppose it’s not that surprising.

In the meantime, here’s a scene I do like reasonably well.

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The airlift opened on the seventh level and we stepped out.  Gil went to the edge of the balcony to lean over the slender carved railing and look down.  I did not join him.  I had tried that my first trip here and regretted it.  Depths are more dizzying than heights.

I walked purposefully over to the second archway on the left, this one unusual in its carved grating.  The silver key slid easily into the lock and the grating swung silently open.

This wasn’t the entire literata section, of course, just the most advanced, most obscure books.  Maybe a little part of me was pleased to have an excuse to go exploring here. Continue reading “NaNoWriMo Day 12 and the Hunt for a Plot” →

Apologies for the long silence on the progress of NaNoWriMo!  But the good news is that I haven’t been here because I’ve been over there, head down and typing away at the novel draft.  There’s been some ups and down, with word count advancing and retreating from the by-day goal (though nothing as fraught as earlier in the month!)  And this morning before work I typed my last few hundred words to link-up and flesh out my last couple partial scenes, and typed Fin. at the bottom.

Only to find I was exactly 173 words short of 50,000 for the month!

So I went back and expanded a much earlier scene that I already knew needed revising, to finally wind up at 50,009 by my calculations. 🙂 Trying to get it across 50,000 for NaNo’s validator was a little more complicated, as new and old writing was hopelessly enmeshed within the draft.  I’ve been calculating all month by subtracting my pre-NaNo word count from my total.  So just between you and me, I validated 50,000 words of the novel draft in NaNo’s validator…I just can’t claim that they were the same 50,000 words that I wrote this month.

This makes my fifth NaNo, and it was both the same and different.  Writing in 15 minute sprints, like last year, worked brilliantly again.  I average 400 words in 15 minutes, so I spent the whole month calculating how I could get enough sprints in each day to manage my word goal.  There were fewer moments of big-picture inspiration (suddenly seeing how it all fits together) because this draft was so fully imagined that I already knew how most things fit together…but there were smaller-picture inspiration moments, making a scene work or getting a particularly nice bit of dialogue in.

I have a couple early scenes I still need to write in the draft but I am within a hair’s-breadth of completion and that is truly exciting.  Though I am also already making extensive plans for the revisions…so this may still go on for quite a while.

But today I’m celebrating another 50,000 word November.  So have an excerpt about books! I wrote most of this during November, except for half a page in the middle.  It’s complicated… 🙂

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It took me a month to read Hamlet.  It wasn’t nearly as long or dense as Victor Hugo, with significantly less architecture.  Instead there was love and sword fights and betrayal and conspiracy.  And Erik was right, the plot meandered a lot as Hamlet tried to bring himself to kill his uncle (or decide definitely not to), but they said wonderful things along the way.  There were a few perfectly ordinary phrases I’d been using my whole life without knowing they’d come by way of Hamlet.

I thought it was delightful.  Right up until the final Act.  And that sent me marching off to Erik’s apartments in a state of righteous outrage.

I knocked first (I wasn’t that outraged) and once he invited me to enter I strode in and demanded, “Why didn’t you tell me Hamlet died?” Continue reading “NaNoWriMo Day 30: Across the Fin. Line” →

Closing in on the halfway mark for NaNoWriMo already!  I’ve been running at a deficit ever since political results came in, but the muse, temporarily scared off, seems to have largely returned.  I kept the deficit fairly low, and have now managed to catch back up again this weekend.

I’m hitting some new challenges on the writing front–I was expecting all along that the writing would get easier once I got to the final, more plot-driven section of the book.  Well, I’m there now, and have discovered a new complexity.

You see, when I saw I had a partial draft before NaNo, it wasn’t quite as simple as, say, having written chapters 1-30 and needing the last ten.  I’ve been writing most of this out of order, so it’s more like I wrote the first thirty chapters, had a multi-chapter gap, and then had portions of the final few chapters.  I’ve filled in the gap and am into those final few (which still stretch over a lot of scenes and words).  Now I need to connect things up and fill in missing pieces…and it’s harder to get the word count that way.

I can write a lot of words quickly if I can get into a scene and just tear right through it.  Completing a partial scene or writing transitions between scenes are smaller chunks and it’s harder to get momentum up.

On the other hand…I get to move forward through the book in leaps and bounds since entire scenes are already here.  And I feel that I’m really finally getting down near the end–which is exciting and alarming!  But more exciting. 🙂

Have an excerpt!

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Everything was perfectly fine and I was perfectly happy and I was perfectly, perfectly content without Erik at all.  Or so I kept telling myself. Continue reading “NaNoWriMo Day 13: Back from the Deeps” →