Tag Archives: nanowrimo

Dropping out, but still writing

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I am a writer.

Image by DavidTurnbull via Flickr

Here’s the short version: I’m dropping out of NaNoWriMo to avoid burnout. Yes, after only five days. But I’m still writing.

The long version is that I’m only dropping out on a technicality, and here’s why.

See, I’ve written one day on NaNoWriMo thus far. Sunday, I was physically exhausted from ICC — no worries, it happens. Monday, I wrote a really solid 2,500 (and hated most everything I wrote, but that’s part of the process, I think). Tuesday, I was out for several hours entertaining guests from Ireland, and got back late. Wednesday, I was mentally exhausted, so I gave myself a pass. Today, I was charged up for writing at work (which I’ve been doing pretty much every day this week), but I realized that I was dreading going back to my novel.

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Outlining

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Night Fall Cover

Image by eddyfate via Flickr

This weekend I finally took all of the brainstorming I’ve done for Night Fall and starting turning it into an outline.

I used a modified version of the Snowflake Method for plotting. Last week I started with a one-sentence"elevator pitch" for the book, and expanded that into a paragraph of five sentences, making sure that most of them ended with some sort of complication. Today I took that paragraph and expanded each sentence into its own paragraph, detailing the progression from start to finish in more detail. I then broke out each sentence of those paragraphs and numbered them. These were the building blocks for each chapter.

I then spent a couple of hours putting everything into yWriter. (For those of you familiar with yWriter, I have one "scene" per "chapter" — I want lots of short chapters for this, so it makes the most sense structurally in the software.) I used the sentence I wrote for the chapter as the chapter’s description. Each scene also asked for a goal, a conflict, and a resolution, which I filled out based on what I had in mind. This lead to some restructuring of my chapters, which I did on the fly as it made sense (and I fully expect I’ll do again as the book comes along). yWriter also asks which characters are in which scenes, which forced me to start fleshing out which characters+ I’ll need for the story.

I approached the novel as a straight-forward adventure story. Most of the comedy I like usually comes from entertaining writing and scenes, not from a zany plot, so I wrangled my plotting as if I were writing a legitimate vampire hunter story. Besides, by plotting "straight," I don’t have to worry about whether the premise is funny (since it isn’t), and I think I can find some organic humor from the plot tropes of the genre as well.

In the end, I have 29 chapters roughed out. Even if I assume about two thousand words for each chapter (which would make each chapter very short), that’s 58,000 words, which is well over my NaNoWriMo goal. I think it’s likely the book will end up being longer than that, though, so expect I’ll be talking about this well into December. Part of what leads me into thinking this will go long is because I have 13 named characters at this point (although, to be fair, one is a pug dog).

If I have time later this week, I’ll start fleshing out details on the characters to make them all unique and interesting (and funny, of course). In the meantime, I’m excited about working on this!

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What I’m doing, and why I’m doing it

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Night Fall Cover

Image by eddyfate via Flickr

First off, I decided to write Night Fall, the parody novel of female vampire hunter "bad girl" protagonists, featuring Katrina Night. I even mocked up a fake book cover last week and posted it on Flickr, to help me visualize the book itself more clearly. I covered the various reasons why I didn’t pick the other novel options a while back. I spent some of my post-surgery recovery time brainstorming and jotting down random ideas that have come to me, and man, I have tons of ideas for this. I’m actually having difficulty narrowing them all down, which is a good sign, I think.

One thing that came up over the past week or so, however, is the question "Why do NaNoWriMo at all?" Chuck Wendig actually did a good job playing devil’s advocate over on his blog (which, if you are not reading, you should be), and I think it’s good to spell out my specific reasons for doing this.

Why I’m Doing This

Better than I thought. Also, ICC.

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Panama Health Care - Surgery 1

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The check-up with the surgeon’s office was very short — mostly it was a cleaning of the extraction sites and a quick lesson in how to do it myself (twice a day). The nurse told me that actually I’m doing really well — many patients can’t really even open their mouths at this point, and nearly all of them are still on constant pain meds (I’m on one pain pill in the morning and the rest of the day on ibuprofin for the past couple of days). The pain, numbness and nausea are all common, especially with the number of extractions I had (apparently I had twelve novocaine injections for this surgery). I asked if I would be able to eat and talk around this time next week, and the nurse said that shouldn’t be a problem, and if it is a problem, I should probably come in for another (free) post-op check-up.

I asked because next week is ICC. I also found out that I’m going to be working in the office for parts of ICC weekend — probably all of Wednesday, and likely at least part of Thursday and Friday. That may also mean coming home Wednesday and Thursday night to make sure our pets are handled and fed, and so I can get up and go to work without bothering Michelle and David by waking up insanely early (by convention standards). So, I’m not going to be around as much as I’ve been at previous ICCs — in fact, I think this ICC I’ll be positively scarce until Friday evening. This does mean I don’t have to rush Whitechapel, though, and I might even fudge my NaNoWriMo wordcount to start late next week instead of trying to cram it in on the Sunday of ICC.

Which reminds me — I need to post about my NaNoWriMo plans. But first, I need to do the Whitechapel Post-Mortem.

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Down to two

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I looked over the poll results, and I did a lot of thinking about what I really want to write. (I even added a novel idea that I forgot about, got attached to it for a while, and then ultimately cut it.) Ultimately, I told myself that there’s a decent chance that all of those will get written at some point, so I just had to decide what I really wanted to live with right now for a month straight.

The Bureau wasn’t particularly popular, and I just spent a couple of weeks working on a superhero RPG anyway, so I cut that pretty quickly.

Writing two projects at the same time means I should probably diversify, or else I’ll get sick of writing horror/mystery after November, which isn’t fair to Whitechapel. That meant cutting As The Devil Drives and Do The Job (which was the professional wrestling/murder mystery idea I remembered after I posted last night).

Thy Kingdom Come was surprisingly popular (both in the poll and to me personally), but references to steampunk actually decided it for me. TKC was an idea I had long before the steampunk craze came along, because I love 19th century literature. However, I’m kind of sick of steampunk right now, and a check of my gut made me go "blech" when thinking about it. I do want to write that book at some point (maybe even next year), but I’m just not in the brainspace to do that now. If I were freelancing, I’d suck it up and deal with it, but since I’m primarily writing this for me, I gave myself a pass.

Besides — I think I really want to stretch my skills and try comedy. And that pretty much narrowed the field to Terrifying Disappointment and Night Fall.

Both have some characters I’m intrigued by. Both have some rough basics of the background sketched out. Both have some vague plots in my head. And both have huge gaps of personal knowledge that terrify me. It’s a balance of comfort and fear that’s probably good for me.

Thanks to everyone who gave me their thoughts on this. Now I have to push this to the back of my head, read up on a couple of things, and lay the groundwork for next week, so I can make a decision and (if I decide I’m crazy enough to do this), start outlining and researching after my surgery.

Some Quick Updates

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Originally published at The Whitechapel Project (for MP3s and polls, click this link). You can comment here or there.

NaNoWriMo_2
Image by nataliesap via Flickr

A few quick things that Whitechapel readers might be interested in.

  • Shadow Freak is the sorry bastard lucky winner of the Agent Mission contest. He (or someone with his name, at least) will be dying in a future episode of Whitechapel. Congrats, Freak!
  • I recorded a short Whitechapel promotional piece for The Podge Cast, episode 60. It’s intentionally done in a slightly raw style (similar to my White Wolf Blogcast), but it’s around fifty-eight and a half minutes into the episode, if you’re interested. It was fun and easy to do, so I might send them more “hodges” in future. Many thanks to David Pinilla and the rest for letting me babble a bit about my baby!
  • Finally, I’m seriously considering doing NaNoWriMo this year. However, I’m not entirely sure which novel I’m going to write. If you want to help me out, you can sneak over to my LiveJournal and vote on any options you like.

As a reminder, voting will be two weeks long for Episode 5, so get some friends to come over and vote on which questions Six should ask!

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What novel should I write?

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Between encouragement (well, mocking) from my family and a few people at work keen on the idea, I’m seriously considering giving National Novel Writing Month a try this year. Which means I have to start outlining… well, now.

I’ve actually wanted to try NaNoWriMo for about five years now, but I’ve never had a chance to. This year I actually do, and I have the energy for it as well — Whitechapel has really gotten me excited about writing longer pieces of fiction. While I’ve written whole books before, I haven’t ever even tackled a novel before, so this will be totally new to me.

That isn’t to say that I haven’t had ideas for novels all this time. In fact, I’ve had several. I’ve managed to narrow it down to five that I have interest in and notes for, but I’m having a hard time choosing, so I wanted to see what y’all thought. I won’t necessarily go with the most popular option — it might be that I look at that option and go "Ugh," which means that I really had my heart set on another idea and didn’t realize it — but it will help me boil my options down to one. Here are the "elevator pitches" for each, and any pros or cons against them.

  • As The Devil Drives: A demon-possessed mobster runs afoul of a washed-up detective who has seen things most people won’t believe. (Horror detective fiction) This is actually a novel I wrote a chapter or two on a while back, but I could never get moving on it. In feel it would be pretty close to Whitechapel, which means I might want to consider something a little different to change it up.
  • Night Fall: A witty female vampire hunter gets caught up in the society of the local undead who are all idiots. (Comedic modern fantasy) This is actually what started the idea of NaNoWriMo going — a parody of various female vampire hunter novels out there. Of course, this is pretty close to what I do for a living, so it’s got a similar strike against it as "As The Devil Drives" in terms of mood overlap.
  • Terrifying Disappointment: The salvage crew of the HCSS Terrifying Disappointment find that they are the only hope left in their sector of space against an alien menace. (Comedic sci-fi) I’ve been watching a lot of comedic sci-fi recently, so this idea is pretty fresh to me, but it would be two genres I’ve never done before.
  • The Bureau: A group of empowered individuals work together in secret to defeat a race of dimensional creatures from taking over the world. (Modern pulp superheroes) This is a pretty old idea that I’ve been poking at again recently. I like the idea, but I’m not entirely sure if it’s a novel or something else.
  • Thy Kingdom Come: The War of Heaven comes to Earth in the late 19th century. (Dramatic alt history) Another old idea, and not something I’ve worked on recently, but I did a lot of research a few years ago, and I’m pretty sure I still have all those notes somewhere.

So, if youhave a second, click on the titles you think are interesting/would be interesting for me to write/think I would have fun writing. You can choose as many as you want — again, I’m not looking for hard data, but just collecting some random opinions to give me something to mull over and help me narrow these choices down.

(Note: Poll is not working for some, so if you can’t vote, just toss your thoughts in a comment, tweet them to me on Twitter, or email me.)

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