NaNoWriMo

Last updated: 12/3

Novel is here, if you want to skip the notes.

Some Notes

For those of you actually brave enough to try reading this...

The novel has two threads of narrative: one that is moving backwards from the endpoint (a la Memento), and one that is proceeding forwards. This is a neat experiment (proposed by Shannon) that was not quite successful, and I'm not sure what I'm going to do about it, although I know that it's confusing for the reader.

At any rate, the following chapters work backwards:

Endgame
Pursuit
Escape
Meeting

... and the end of Preparation merges up with the beginning of Meeting. Trio essentially takes up where Endgame ends.

The pacing is rather odd. The first chapters are rather slow, while towards the end, while I was trying to meet the deadline and yet cram in events in my 50,000 word budget, I kill entire squads of people in appositions. (At the beginning, I thought I was writing a mystery, but I decided soon thereafter that a mystery took tighter plotting than I could really afford on a deadline, so I fell back onto science fiction.)

This is an ongoing project, and I plan to edit this until I'm happy with it. At which point... I don't know, we'll see.

Some Thoughts (Or: "What I Learned on my NaNoWriMo Vacation")

I learned quite a bit. Writing a novel is a large scale task, and it helps immensely to have the things plotted out beforehand, at least loosely enough that you have a general idea where it is going. I found that the writing went much faster if I had in my mind the key scenes... then it became a matter of connecting the scenes with words. That's why I was able to write 25K words in four or five days, the mental images were clear as crystal to me.

Writing is much easier to do when other people are doing it at the same time. It's probably an odd phenomena to see: a bunch of people in a coffee shop, all typing on their computers, occasionally calling out random questions like, "I need a word that means <this>", but it actually works fairly well. The people that do NaNoWriMo tend to be artsy and creative and pretty fun in general.

NaNoWriMo

The main web site for NaNoWriMo is here.

You can see the global word count page here.

Winners list is here.

Current Status

[11/30] Added Seduction, Poverty, Negotiation, Trio, and Finale.

[11/29] Added Genius, Transfer. Still working.

[11/28] Added Search.

[11/27] Okay, a couple of changes:

• added Escape chapter between Meeting and Pursuit. Basically it covers what happens right after the gas station and before the chase scene, and uses Ted's cool imagery.
• Dinner, Telephone, and Answering Machines have been combined into one chapter.
• tweaked Meeting to merge up with the beginnings/endings of Pursuit, Escape.
• Modified Aura; his powers are now very minor at the end of the chapter.
• Added Effect (new chapter).

So, if you've been reading all along, then read Escape, reread Aura, and read Effect.

[11/13] Finished chapter 11.

[11/11] Working on chapter 11, should be completed tomorrow.

[11/10] Reworked chapter 9 according to Ted and Dawn (basically, Roberta became Gwen halfway through). Don't know what the hell that was, but I promise that Roberta and Gwen do not turn out to become the same person. :-)

Added rough draft of chapter 10.

[11/8] Chapter 9 is rough, but at least the plot is set down.

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