thewhitelily | Entries tagged with nano07

So we've come to the end of another November and I've come to the end of another novel. Well. As someone who writes out of order, the word "end" can be creatively applied to mean not so many absolutely terribly gaping holes remaining. As such, I've applied it here, even though there's at least two places that have only the barest bits of scaffolding to show where the story goes.

The story itself is... unexpectedly intriguing. Of course, it's a completely different story to the one I started with, in almost every respect. It's pretty much followed the plot that burst into my brain at the beginning of week 2, although it developed a number of unexpected themes as well as a rather fun major secondary character.

In the end, it isn't all a dream, and in fact my muse didn't press that point at all after receiving notice that my lawyers would be in touch with his. It doesn't need to be a dream, I can make it work without, I just need to work on my protagonist's characterisation a bit more until she can manage a ten-year-mope (leaving her husband to raise their disabled daughter alone) without losing the reader's sympathy. Yeah, I'm pretty confident I can manage that. :P (Actually - thank you, muse - I've just realised how I can. See what happens when we cooperate?)

( As far as the future of Cloud Castles goes... )

In other news: where's my weekend gone? Waaaaah, two ballet concerts, a gymnastics recital, and serving as chef/waitress/dishwasher for mother-in-law's orchestra's Christmas breakup party, all crammed into my first two days after NaNo! Sometimes I wish I wasn't the good aunt/daughter-in-law...

Total final word count 50,003 words AND complete.

A more detailed entry on the subject will be forthcoming, but right now?

I'm off to drink some cosmopolitans. :)

Dear Sir,

I am writing to inform you of my intense dissatisfaction with your recent proposition to have the entire proceedings of the novel come out as having been a dream.

I remain unmoved by your assertions that makes it easier to kill off various characters, to gloss over the some ten years that the protagonist has spent moping, to introduce technologies without worrying about their legal, ethical, or social implications, to bring in characters or technologies with absurdly fantastic tendencies, or to have the protagonist make completely wrong choices all the way through and wake up with a second chance at happiness.

I am equally unimpressed by your contention that it makes sense, given the protagonist happens to take a massive drug overdose in the prologue.

Reaching the end of a story and finding out that it was all a dream is not only cliche, it's sloppy, it isn't something that can be simply thrown in right at the end of the story, it's annoying, and it's against every one of the philosophical and literary principles I hold dear.

I will not do it. I absolutely refuse, and I consider your stated intention of holding the remainder of the story for ransom until I comply with your demands to be unconscionable and in contradiction with all international treaties for the humane treatment of authors.

Pretty please, with a cherry on top, could I have another idea, please?

Love,
Lily.

I'm finished.

No, I'm not really - there's several scenes/whole chapters left as a few dot points that need to be filled out, and there's quite a few things that I need to develop in my villain, my protagonist's history, both denouments, the emotional schism. There's all sorts of scenes left providing opportunities for both creativity and joining the dots.

I'm nowhere near finished.

But I'm finished. I'm just shy of 35,000 words, and last night I officially fell behind - not because I didn't have time to write, but because I'm out of energy. I would take a day off, but then I'd be even further behind, and...

Deep breaths.

The most horrible thing is that the words actually come if I sit there in front of my screen, staring at my word processor without allowing myself to be distracted. They're even not bad, as long as I haven't put it off until 11:30 when my eyes are drooping and my imagination flagging to the point where I go to bed simply because I know what I'm writing just isn't worth getting myself overtired for.

But the distractions are sooooo tempting! The couch! The Internet! That half-forgotten fanfic that's just come to mind! Looking for the perfect name for a character! Writing LJ entries that I'm too ashamed to post because people will realise how pathetic I am! Sleep!

Okay. I'm going to bed at 10pm tonight. No. Matter. What. Ten pm is my midnight tonight. I'm going to get some decent sleep, and wake up with a new perspective in the morning.

That leaves me with twenty minutes to eat dinner, half an hour to finish watching Criminal Intent while doing my wrist exercises, and two and a half hours to write. Under no circumstances will it be in that order. Two and a half hours is plenty of time to put on another couple of thousand words, even to catch all the way up to even.

The next time a distraction comes my way, I'm going to close my eyes, take a deep breath, let it out slowly, and then go back to my story. If I find myself writing trite nothingness that makes me want to give up altogether, instead I will flick back to some other passage of trite skeletal nothingness that make me want to give up altogether and add some more meat onto its bones.

And I will get back on track.

Edit @ 10:02pm: 36,015 words. Not great, but not terrible, either. And I get to sleep.

Current Mood: exhausted

Final word count for... well, I guess it's technically this morning: 25,122

Go, me!

Current Mood: jubilant

I'm faaaaaamous!

Now, if only the words for my story were coming as easily as the plot.

And still they gazed, and still the wonder grew
That one small head could carry all he knew.
-- Oliver Goldsmith, The Deserted Village

The night before last, I was pretty happy to find a villain. Last night, I found the rest of my story.

It's day seven, I'm a quarter of the way through, and instead of hitting Week Two Blues, I seem to have mainlined the entire Orion supply of Perky Juice.

It all started when my villain from the previous night finally met up with my protagonist and, rather than genteelly pushing her off a cliff, he started making annoyingly unspecific threats, and when I tried to make him get more specific I realised...

Everything. It was one of those intense explosions of clarity, the kind of ecstatic flash of plot coalescence that should be familiar to any NaNoWriMoer who has started without anything resembling a plot and ended the month with a novel, where I could see the whole story laid out in front of me, spreading out in all directions, complete with motivations, reasons, themes, context, and overwhelming potential.

... and then he pushed her off the cliff.

If I'd been taking a bath when it happened, I would have been halfway down the street shrieking Eureka! before I even realised it. As it was, I contented myself with dancing and running around the house screaming wordlessly, fully clothed, and spending the rest of the night visiting my sister as a fidgety wreck, with the whole thing in my head, desperate to get back to my story.

I now have a quest for my protagonist, which falls naturally into three sub-goals before she can acheive her main goal. I have the potential for the villain to throw any number of bizarre encounters or random obstacles in her path, if these sub-goals don't provide enough material along the way. I have an entire virtual fantasy world originally created by a little girl, which gives me the freedom to (a) mock any cliche that I want to as well as (b) use it anyway. I have an intelligent, cruel, motivated villain who is thoroughly enjoying himself in the role of a lifetime. I have the development and resolution of physical, personal, and relationship conflicts faced by the protagonist all rolled into one coherent story. I even have a map.

And it's all just there in my brain, bubbling away at increasing pressures and straining to gush out of my fingers the moment I sit down in front of a Word document.

Why do I do NaNoWriMo?

Hah.

Current Mood: exuberant

And I've suddenly had a villain leap fully formed out of a throwaway line in the middle of a couple of paragraphs I'd put in to explain away a little plot divot. (Seriously, I wouldn't even have called it a plot hole - it was just me deciding I should think up a more interesting way to get from A to B than "my protagonist has leet hacking skillz".)

Yay, yay, yay! Special thanks go to procrastination via watching Law and Order: Criminal Intent. That put me in the right frame of mind to recognise the true potential of a random, old, mostly forgotten foe whom our protagonist was forced to take a big gamble to beat, not realising that in the process she'd revealed her biggest vulnerability, and who is now looking for revenge. *nods*

Hurrah for a villain! And given the location (Cassie's Castle, see previous post) - he may even get to do some moustache twirling and cape swishing!

~~And now I need to keep actually writing. Darnit!~~

Also: any ideas on what the digital parallel of the word "incarnation" would be? Carn is the root meaning flesh. Can I just replace that by bin, or something similar, and end up with the essense of a person - not just represented by - but infused into a digital body? Any linguists here? Or does "inbination" work for people?

~~*not procrastinating* *really*~~

Still doing it tough on the word count, but... oh, boy, today's words are some fine verbiage. Worth sharing a small sample, I think. :)

( Oooh, an excerpt! )

Now, if only my muse would let these prettypretty words out just a little bit quicker. And in shorter sentences. :P

@

the_zaniak: At first I was worried, because the character I named after you for this year's dare was once again randomly turning out to be a complete bastard. Now he's milk-soppy father-figure. Oh well, since he seems to be both, I'm sure I'll hit some middle ground eventually.

I'm over 2000 words, which has been a bit of a struggle, but I'm past my daily target, so all is well. Slow and steady wins the race.

The biggest bone of contention between myself and my muse is his abrupt decision that my protagonist is in a wheelchair. I can't decide whether to give in on this point, so at the moment I'm avoiding mentioning anything about how she gets from one place to another.

Mostly, I don't mind this subplot - in fact, I think it'is quite cool - except that I'm quite certain that her daughter, who is probably the other main character, suffered a brain injury as a small child which resulted in complications some fifteen years later that means she's in a coma.

Still, I would rather not have the two main characters entirely coincidentally disabled; that's just sloppy, so I guess unless the reasons for putting Louisa in a wheelchair get substantially more compelling, I'll keep her walking around. Even if it does makes my muse all pouty and angsty.

Might head off to bed early tonight. I've got my words out and they're actually pretty good plot wise and quality wise. But I still can't help wishing that I'd managed to write anything that looked remotely as I'd expected it too.

Time for a bit more plot dreaming, I think.

Current Mood: hopeful

It’s the countdown to NaNoWriMo – less than twelve hours remaining!

Last year, before November started, I read No Plot? No Problem! which was most interesting in a number of ways. But one of the things that struck me was the assertion that writers often find themselves writing books that they’d never read, and that’s never a good thing. The suggestion was to make a “Magna Carta” of all the things they like (or don't like!) in a book, and make sure they’re doing some – or all – of them in their story. I wrote a list back then, but didn’t publish it – this year I’ve decided to expand and post it.

So here we go: my fictional kinks. If a book’s got a fair few of these in it, I’m practically guaranteed to like it.

( Magna Carta I )

And now for the the Magna Carta I’s evil twin. These are the elements of a story that will make me pull my hair out, spend all night jittering with rage or disgust, tear out the offending pages and burn them, then bury the ashes at the bottom of the compost heap.

( Magna Carta II )

In other news, I now have a working title: Cloud Castles – and my protagonist has finally deigned to inform me that her first name is Louisa, but she’d really prefer to be called Lou. Oh, and my wrists have settled down to a managable level. Yay!

So, November is nearly upon us once more, and the answer is yes. Yes, I will once more be participating in NaNoWriMo.

My lessons learned include:
1) Don't even try to write in order. I can't count the number of times I've made this mistake: I just can't write in order, and I screw things up if I try. Write what I know, and follow that up by writing the bits I've learned while doing it.
2) Know at least one problem for the protagonist in each of the three main categories (external conflict, internal conflict, relationship conflict) before I start.
3) Be true to the original flash, and make sure to have one, even if I have to spend an entire weekend lucid dreaming to get it
4) Stick with the successful high-tech spreadsheet rather than fooling myself with annoying low-tech notecards
5) Have at least one - preferably more than one - event happen every day. Under absolutely no circumstances let an internal monologue just continue until I work out what happens next.
6) Don't let myself procrastinate writing sessions within a day, even though I know I am fully able to actually hit word targets in a small amount of time.

( As for the story itself... )

I've got two other possibilities for the story if this one doesn't work out, but I really don't think it'd be good for my momentum if I peter out from one story a few days in and have to switch.

So. Specifics. Sounds like it's time to do some sleeping in - or given the new sleep schedule - some early nights. :)

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The White Lily

January 2021

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NaNo 07 Wrap Up
Winnah!
Note to my Muse
Stalled
Half way
My real name in lights! (Or at least cathode rays.)
NaNoWriMo Day 6 - 12,127 words
Villain, yay!
NaNoWriMo Day 3 - 6,085 words
NaNoWriMo Day 1 - word count 2,061
Magna Cartas
NaNoWriMo '07

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Lily's Pond of Fictional Reflections

General ramblings of a fic-aholic insomniac

Entries tagged with nano07

NaNo 07 Wrap Up

Winnah!

Note to my Muse

Stalled

Half way

My real name in lights! (Or at least cathode rays.)

NaNoWriMo Day 6 - 12,127 words

Villain, yay!

NaNoWriMo Day 3 - 6,085 words

NaNoWriMo Day 1 - word count 2,061

Magna Cartas

NaNoWriMo '07