This Year’s NaNo Plans

The National Novel Writing Month – 50000 words in 30 days. This is a writing challenge I’ve participated in (almost) every year since 2006. Never won, but… to be honest? It’s the energy, the community, and especially it’s the fun and pushing myself to see how far I can go and when the event is over, looking back at what I’ve written and feeling amazed because hey, this is actually pretty darn good that keeps me doing NaNo.

Okay, that’s a lot of ands, but I’ve never been the best at explaining how I feel about something.

Getting back to the point – I’ve picked up a bad habit over the years of only cottoning on to the fact that yes, NaNo is November and November is soon, in the last week or so of October. In one way, it’s a canny unconscious ploy to keep me from getting bored from with my idea and switching over and over (a huge problem), but in another… yeah.

This year’s a bit simpler for me.

I’ve had this world stuck in my head since 2011, and five years of it churning around, occasionally being written, changed, revised, and just plain coming together as a thing, pretty much means I’m beyond obsessive really dedicated stuck with this until I give it a home on paper. Which I’m happy to do.

Thing is, it’s not a novel… it’s kind of confusing what it is. Every time I write something set in this world, it’s like part of a serial. Flash fictions, all tying in together and hinting to other flash fictions… and I really want to see what this all looks like, strung together.

So a tiny piece of that is what I’ll be working on for NaNo. That tiny piece is the Dead Town Chronicles – mostly because the town itself is the only real constant in this particular part of the vaguely-defined timeline (five years and… you know? I am the world’s slowest planner. But hey, by 2050, I might actually have a name for this thing!). So my biggest problems with that are – pretty obviously – I need to consolidate my ‘facts’, and figure out what I don’t know.

That means it’s story bible time!

And writing a story bible is terrifying. Which is probably why I, uh, haven’t actually started mine yet. I have spent so long fiddling with this world that now I’ve got it pared back and identified what I need to know… the act of putting this thing that has existed and percolated in my mind for so long, down on actual, physical paper is – yeah, I’d better update my diary first, while I’m still in the mood. Fetch a Pepsi Max. Glue more writing prompts onto my pink pages. Daydream. Listen to the NoSleep or Russian Rulers History podcasts, check my inbox and online shopping orders, wait until I’ve got character portraits to add to their pages, oh, anything.

Most tellingly of all, the excuse of ‘I’m too tired/nervous/bored/want to do something else, better wait ’til I’m in the mood’… because then I won’t screw it up any more than I normally would. Perfectionism, the perfect cure for which is… just get on with it.

Did I mention that writing a blog post is also procrastination? And amazing motivation, too… I have these problems, and now people can see them. It’s a weird accountability thing I’ve had for as long as I remember. So, more on the story bible and the rest of my NaNo prep later… when they’re all nice and developing!

It’s an Update! It’s a Complaint! No, It’s Both!

Insert zombie noises here.

Recently in the darling town where I live, the weather has gone off its meds and joined some kind of extremist militia. While today it’s been nice out, I’m not joking when I say it can be stifling hot one day, and cold the next… not to mention the storms that swept across two states. We were lucky that only the rain caught us – two places had tornadoes! I didn’t even know we got those in Australia! Luckily the most damage they did was ripping the roofs off three houses; what worries me is where are these people going to get the money to pay for repairs? Sure they can put up tarps on the outside, but if those tarps go, so does everything in their house.

Anyway, it was an interesting few days for the news. Unfortunately, all this is the perfect weather for migraine-like headaches and (especially) fatigue… not to mention, my sleep ‘schedule’ is all over the place.

So… the news for NaNo is obviously less than encouraging. I’m honestly not sure what my wordcount is, but last time I checked, it was only at 3449 words… and there’s precious little been written since then. (Pretty sure the lyrics to Cyborg Dion’s epic love song/virus removal classic My Nuclear Reactor Will Go On doesn’t count). There’s a couple reasons for this –

a) Fatigue CATS may have kidnapped my creativity. There’s no proof of this, not even a single courtesy AYB, but clearly it’s gone somewhere and if you can’t blame an old meme, what can you blame?
b) Substantial overestimation of how quickly I can handwrite… to be fair, I really did mean to use the typewriter. It’s just I haven’t been able to track down a Royal Quiet de Luxe at an affordable time, and my Torpedo 700 wakes people up (and aggravates my headaches).

I’m not sure whether I should continue with NaNoWriMo or not. On one hand, I can begin again and use the computer, which will drive my wordcount right up. On the other hand… it may just be wise to give this one a skip. I don’t know, I just the hope the weather smooths out.

I will be getting thinking on this. But! More stuff to follow. Plus, being more social (because there are questions I am dying to ask and don’t want to put them in the tangle of me that’s an update post)…

ETA: Just realised this is my first November in this place (my physical location, not wordpress). So yay!

Wordcount and Cake!

I will remember to be social soon. Soon as I start feeling like a human again. Today was… oh god, the weather.

Three nights ago, it was too cold to stay up. Last night? Last night it boiled. It wasn’t just hot, it was incredibly humid into the bargain. The worst thing is that neither of my windows face the wind’s direction… and it just didn’t occur to me to take my work to the kitchen table *cough, embarrassed mutter* The pounding heat headache might have had something to do with that.

So today, my wordcount rests at… 1089 words. I’m disappointed, but not very. There were a couple hours I could have written, but chose not to. One of my relatives is off to harvest, so I baked a cake:

It… looks better without the icing, but eh. After I took this photo, I found some shimmery edible gold dust stuff and sprinkled it on top.

As for what the cake is, it’s this beautiful recipe, tweaked slightly to allow for pears rather than fruit cocktail, and no cream cheese for the icing (I used a 3/4ths of a tablespoon of yogurt instead. It all adds flavour).

I’ve made this recipe before – it’s heavenly if you use tropical fruit – but I can honestly say this is the first time I’ve made a cake with pears. I hope it turns out okay.

In the meantime, I am genuinely tired. I’m practically hamstringing myself by taking a break now, but this weather. Tomorrow I’ll get some stuff done on the computer, make up the difference. But for today…

NaNo Progress
Wordcount: 1089
Feeling: You don’t know this, but I’m actually sitting here with half my jaw hanging off and a hunger for human flesh the desire to see what more my characters will bring me… tomorrow.
Mysteries: What’s up with Anderson being all creepy? Was he in love with Alisa – or is it really as simple as respect for an ideological opponent*? And most importantly… how could she possibly have been someone Anderson respected? I have an excellent idea as to the answer, but that’s for later.
Sanity: I’m confused and half the time not sure what I’m doing. In better weather, this would be fun!
Other Things: My Notemaker parcel should arrive tomorrow (it better). Yay more inks and new pens!

Day 1: A Kind of Parody
Alisa: You know, I regret inviting you inside already. Also I’m strongly tempted to make that ‘whiskey voice’ of yours literal, via broken bottle.
Anderson: … you really have anger issues, don’t you?
Alisa: Of course not! Now stand still so I can sink my vocal claws into you properly!
Anderson: Okay, but only if I can say things, then stare at you creepily as you basically go into shock over the death of your room mate.
Alisa: Oka – WHAT?
Anderson: Uh, yeah. She’s dead.
Alisa: THAT IS NOT COOL.
Gunshots: Hi guys!
Anderson: Neither’s trying to skip town, which you’re obviously doing. By the way, I’m taking over!
Gunshots: So guys, what are we talking about?
Alisa: Um… good for you? So… what do you want and why are you here? Are you happy with your currently existing phone service provider?
Anderson: Not really, I don’t think we have power in the post-apocalypse.
Alisa: How do you even know my room mate’s dead, huh?
Anderson: Check the garage full of magic cars. Also, I have an offer for you.
Gunshots: Hey! Can you guys even hear me over there?
Alisa: I’m not interested unless you start talking right now.
Anderson: I need you to take a message somewhere for me.
Alisa: That’s… really specific. Thanks.
Gunshots: Not to be rude, but do you two even realise that there are people possibly dying because of me?
Both: SHUT UP!

Okay, it diverges a little, but that’s basically where I’m at. Dialogue-wise, anyway.

—

*This. Yes please. I’m very much of the mind that love and sex is overrated, or at least overrepresented. When did ‘relationship’ start meaning only romance or sex?!

A Desk to NaNo On

My desk, used for typewriting and handwriting. There’s a… surprising amount of pink. Anyway. Those coloured folders to the left hand side house every bit of writing I’ve managed to save over the years (aka less than half… I still have a grudge against Acer computers, and as for my pre-Word years, well, ’90’s me didn’t save stuff) and as you can tell, I’m up to the spring pink folder.

Pens in their holder, and inks in the black basket. Ballpoint pens, colourful gel pens, fountain pens… and of course their attendant inks… full disclosure, I have arthritis (it seems like something that only afflicts the elderly, but no, that’s not the case at all) and most pens are difficult for me to handle after a while. I’m pretty sure this also has something to do with the shape of my hands – my palms are large but my fingers normal. Fountain pens are much more comfortable and the inks. How can you walk past so many beautiful colours? There are even scented inks and shimmery inks now! Plus, fountain pens are unbelievably durable (Lamy Safaris, for example, are made of the same stuff Legos are) and ready to go. I don’t lose them, never have to worry about ink flow, no power source is needed, I like the way it makes my handwriting look, and I can write wherever and whenever my black little heart desires. The occasional ink-stained fingers and clean aren’t too steep a price to pay for that.

(Recently I’ve fallen in love with my grey Kaweco Skyline Sport with J. Herbin Violette Pensee ink. I actually bought the Kaweco – which has a chrome clip – during a trip to a nearby town, the first time I’ve found fountain pen stuff available anywhere… the ink, I got from Notemaker, which has less than Goulet Pens, but has the advantage of being in the same country as me. The American dollar is kind of killing us at the moment.)

Moving on, you can see some blank paper for typewriter work (typewriters have no distractions and force you to concentrate on your words. It’s brilliant; I actually got my first one when I was living in a caravan and trying to cut down on the power… the first time I used one was November 25 last year, for NaNo. With the lack of editing, it’s perfect for NaNo too) in a magazine holder, beside some notebooks. Sandwiched between those and the books are two Rhodia No. 18 notepads – I got those from the store I mentioned earlier. I actually prefer the Clairefontaine Triomphe tablet, but like I said, the Rhodias were at the store and the US dollar is killing us.

The books are…

• The Baby Name Wizard by Laura Wattenberg. Love this, especially the lists at the back. It’s interesting to see how my names fit in with each other (surprisingly well…). There’s also a website, which personally I don’t use.
• The New Baby Name Survey, by Bruce Lansky. Some names and the most common impressions people have of them. Very nice.
• The Writer’s Digest Character Naming Sourcebook, by Sherrilyn Kenyon. Arranged by language and gender. Also lists surnames, which I love… English surnames are now an endangered species in my stories *cough*
• The Concise Thesaurus: An A-Z Dictionary of Synonyms. Love it. It lists the base words, followed by a few similar words, but it defines each word clearly and simply. I can’t find a link for it, which isn’t too surprising – I got it for $5 at a bargain shop more than ten years ago (it has no less than two price stickers still stuck to it…)
• Fascinate: Your 7 Triggers to Persuasion and Captivation, by Sally Hogshead. No, I’m not such a terrible writer I have to resort to pop-culture-y books on marketing: it’s the triggers themselves that are why I keep this close at hand. The author lists seven triggers that stab right to your instincts and pull you in, and talks about how we’re each attuned to the different triggers. Two (clumsy) examples of triggers in action are Ma’s Home-Baked Apple Pie, Cooking Since 1884, known for delicious product and excellent customer service, for example, is Trust with a hint of Prestige, where HURRY! GOING OUT OF STOCK! SALE ENDS SOON! is of course all Alarm. Anyway, I like having the book handy because… frankly, I’m not that big in themes and my grasp of subtext is pretty much limited to action and dialogue. This kind of reminds me to go deeper… and I admit it, it’s interesting to see how people react when I do use the triggers. Especially with the character Molly, who manages to combine both Trust and Alarm.

The perfume in the little tube is Snow Gardenia, a MOR perfume I found in the some town I got my fountain pen and notepads from. I like to have a perfume for NaNo, something evocative… Snow Gardenia is the kind of perfume one of my characters would wear (Cross).

Apart from that, you can see my NaNo treats container sort of at the back there, and my holder thingy with various small notepads, emo pads and a Sheaffer pen refill (love the VFMs, and Sheaffer has such nice strong ink). The other lolly container actually holds all my prompts. There’s a lot of them – it took over 25 hours to get them all written.

Anyway, at midnight tonight I’ll be grabbing out the Kaweco and Rhodia, and getting down to work. Chocolate popcorn and Vanilla Coke are my encouragements to keep writing, and I don’t sleep until I get at least 2000 words done. Preferably more – after all, the more you write now, the less there is to do later.

Characters and a World

Weird things are happening around my blog… they seem to right themselves, but blogs have been mysteriously unfollowed and after tweaking with the themes none of my photos would show up for more than an hour, including new ones. Still, whatever bugs are going on… at least they seem to be fixed now.

Anyway.

Today is the day I clean hahaha, finish up the prompts and think about characters, world and touchstones. This world I’m writing in, it’s been around since 2010, and is on its third revision, which doesn’t have a name (yet). Compared to the second version, the flips are less human and reflect their Ancestors better, the scions are now called descendants, their numbers have been culled dramatically and their Families are now just bloodlines of the Dynasty, which is a slightly less shadowy, arrogant, repressive… thing. Cambion are now progenitors. I’m still unsure whether Dead Town would have any electricity at all, but this time I’m going with ‘no’. It seems logical that even if DT had a substantial amount of people who could keep the power grid maintained, things are still going to fail, and good luck replacing something when you can’t get a spare or just flat-out don’t know what you’re doing. Mistakes are even more costly when there’s no replacement part, and scavenged goods don’t last forever…

Anyway, like all good hauntings, there are a few characters who are come pretty much standard with the world now. So when I decided to make November a little more challenging by limiting the characters I’m writing about – I don’t want to be stuck writing characters who don’t keep my attention, and to be honest I’m hoping to get a spark from something to use as a novel – they naturally took up some of the slots.

So, this month’s limited cast will be:

• Mach. A rare ‘sane’ flip, he has spent the last century or so in denial of his own nature. During that time, he’s been drafted to fight for the Remnant, deserted, and is safe from the consequences of his other decisions by a deal with Laca.
• Milena ‘Jacoby‘ Cermakova. Laca’s formerly estranged daughter – who still prefers to be called by her mother’s surname – and right-hand woman. She’s not exactly fond of him, but she has a strong sense of duty keeping her in place. The job benefits don’t hurt, either. She is a patient, smart, somewhat jaded, and has an unusually humane view on the flips.
• Laca Cermak. The shadow behind Dead Town and a genuinely unsettling presence. He likes sunsets, casual mental strolls through the void between spaces, and small square chunks of human flesh.
• ‘Adelaide’ Cross. A woman fleeing the Remnant. What she is, is up for debate, like much of her life, and much to her own irritation, her path keeps crossing Jimmy’s.
• Idris, possibly. Because if you’re going to have a progenitor who makes the most berserk of flips look cuddly, you might as well use him. Not a main or POV character (ever), just worth mentioning.
• Jimmy Smith. Who was perfectly happy being a thug before Cross gatecrashed his life for second or third time.
• Dominic Roche. Mach’s boyfriend and reluctant trouble-solver for a surprising amount of people, up to and including the next character.
• Bethany Stephanides-Ash. Vain, sharp, and exceedingly fond of ’40’s fashion, she’s also the head of the Stephanides-Ash bloodline… a position she manipulated and murdered for. Despite this, she is a genuine visionary whose views oppose the Dynasty’s repressive, xenophobic rule.

Still two characters left… and in unrelated news, today we have a match of Cat vs Box of Pepsi Max. I’m pretty sure I know who’s gonna lose…

As for the touchstones… I have a couple flash fictions I want to rewrite and update (because now my NaNo is expanding to include that, I guess?) and already I have ideas about the characters’ pasts that will make good stories. And with my barrelfull of prompts, pantsing should be easy enough… even though I am handwriting.

Right now, though, I’m off to watch Cube Zero and eat French toast.

ETA: Tomato soup. Raspberry jelly. CHUNKY SALSA. Watch Cube Zero and you’ll get it.

Obligatory Three-Day Panic

There’s only two days left for NaNo Prep – three if you don’t like to take a break on NaNo Eve – and there are still many things to be done.

From my side, it means –

• Put the finishing touches on my spring cleaning.
• Finish transcribing my prompts, because I collect the things and need them on uniformly tiny pieces of paper. Eventually they’ll go into a nice big jar, but right now, they’re gonna have to be happy in a former lolly container.
• Get some photos of my stuff! Because I’m feeling vain, that’s why.
• Figure out my touchstones. Plans to pants aside, I’m gonna need some idea of my characters (in the spirit of challenges, they’ll be a limited cast), and I have some plot ideas to solidify. Probably rant on those later. Generally it helps to have some stuff figured before I go tearing off into the mostly-unknown.
• Find my white leopard-print shawl, for warmth. My cat never tires of the ‘let’s chase the pen!’ game, and thinks an open notebook is a place to nap, so writing in bed is… not the best option.
• Corral all writing materials. Should be easy, they’re all on my desk. Except for the ones which are winging their way to me right now (fine, they’re being driven here, but hush, I like the phrase).

You know, preferably I’ll find something that isn’t the shawl… that thing has bad mental images attached, namely, I bought it when I was living somewhere with a bit of a… pest problem. Imagine peeling back your bedsheets and finding a large adult Huntsman staring back at you… uh, pun unintended. You know how tarantulas look kind of cute and fat thanks to their furry bodies? Huntsmen are rangy and mean-looking. I refuse to provide a Wikipedia link, but if you look it up, imagine that in your bed saying, ‘Hi, baby.’

I wish I could say that was their worst trick. But to get back to the original point, the shawl has a long fringe which was prone to catching things like dead leaves. Dead leaves which can look like the husks of dead spiders… yeah.

Tonight I think will be about the prompts and a cooking experiment. Let’s see what happens when you wrap spinach, grated cheese, some herbs and maybe capsicum in pastry… plus, I’ve picked up a cute little crimpy trick with a fork.
I really should start blogging about recipes, too…

NaNo Rambling!

Ah, NaNoWriMo… fifty thousand words in one month. There’s plenty about this event in my previous posts, but let’s face it – this is the post you’re looking at, and since the other posts are newly imported, it’s also the first post I’ve made about it on this blog.

My first year of NaNo was 2006 (yes, that old), under a terrible pun of a username that mysteriously ceased to exist the next year. Still don’t know why, but I’m not exactly in mourning, either – even if the lack of an accurate join date irritates the hell out of me. The next username I picked, in ’07, doesn’t exist now either, but that was a conscious choice to escape a boring username. In short, you can find me as lethean these days.

And I’ve cycled through even more in the way of stories. Some of them were failures, others were unexpected joys to write, but mostly I enjoy the challenge. My first NaNo was… difficult, thanks to one particular relative, but at the end of the month I looked at my Word document and I’d written more words of that one story, in that one month, than I had to literally anything in the same time period. It felt rewarding. And while I was writing it, it felt good to push past what I usually did, to see how far and fast I could get.

And that was before I’d even discovered the forums!

I’ve written low fantasy, dark fantasy, urban fantasy, science fiction, post-apocalypse, cyberpunk, and last year, a collection of short stories with a metafictional bridge. This year… it’s going back into the post-apocalyptic.

The current Novel Info is mostly there for show: since I’m pantsing, I don’t think I’ll bother with the bridge. Last year taught me I’m not too great at the things, and barely get any of the actual stories done. Best to add the bridges when everything’s written, and since I kind of want to explore past, present and future with these characters… that bridge won’t hold. So we’ll see…

This year’s attempt has kind of mushed together in my mind from disparate sources – characters who keep popping back up in my imagination, old stories I’ve written and really want to re-write to bring them more in line with the world I’ve been working on since… oh, a few years. More on that in other posts, and probably previous ones too.

Another big influence in my choice of world-connected short stories and flash fiction was… Shadow Unit. It’s a fantastic series of ebooks, with the awesome description of being a TV series in words… each volume contains episodes as well as vignettes. Short stories and flash fiction focussed on a core cast, yes there must be other books out there which use the same premise, but this is the first I’ve read – or at least the first that really struck me. So that’s interesting… and I’m borrowing it, with thanks. You have no idea how neatly it solves my problem with the unnamed world I’ve created – that I’m naturally a shorter fiction kind of writer, and couldn’t come up with a longform idea for this world if it saved my life.

So my world… one day, everything is going smoothly. Humans are walking around ignorant of the fact a scheming Dynasty exists in the background, a deliberately bloodline descended from strange beings known only as cambion… some of which are still around. Only instead of being the spawn of Satan, these cambion – and to a lesser extent, their Dynasty descendants – are the results of meshed cores. Because that’s the other thing humanity’s ignorant of: out in space and the void between spaces, exist beings engaged in a deadly civil war – and one side is losing badly. Their survival lies in merging themselves with the closest compatible lifeforms. Humanity counts – but only just. As they begin to lose, as their enemies close in for the final kill – they send out everything they’ve got.

Result: apocalypse.

The ‘flips’ as the media dubs them, essentially wipe out civilisation in two months (later legend will claim three weeks). Imagine that around 30% of your city’s inhabitants suddenly go berserk or turn into subtle saboteurs… yeah. People flee the cities in droves. The police and military are too busy dealing with their own flips; by the time they’re organised, it’s already over.

The following 100+ years is the Ravening, where human civilisation rebuilds in the form of communes, nomadic groups, and the growing ‘new cities’. Humanity learns about cambion and the Dynasty, both of which have no apparent love for the flips. Berserk flips are still wandering. Many continue to fight against the humans in large groups. Some want only to settle down themselves, away from the human threat, and get on with life. There’s an uneven level of human intelligence and humanity among the flips, and many of them regain some degree of their human identities. Most of those choose to stay with their fellow flips, but a few wander back to the human places, happy to be mistaken for refugees. And in the north, the government Remnant grows, aided by the restored military. Eventually they join forces with a few of the larger new cities, to combat the flips in a campaign of extermination. The flips grow quieter, humanity more confident.

This NaNo focusses on a handful of characters from this world, and their experiences. I can’t wait!

Pointless Agonising Over Tiny Things

Now that I’ve decided on a ‘pantsing short stories and flash fiction’ policy and written out my NaNo Prep list – which looks suspiciously like a bunch of chores – a new and surprisingly conflicted question has arisen: what am I going to write with? Despite Heinrich’s boxy presence on my desk, I’m actually feeling more like handwriting. Which actually leads me to justifying my subject line…

I have two adorable new Kaweco fountain pens, nice new J. Herbin cartridges and two Rhodia #18 lined pads all ready and raring to go for NaNo. And then… a spanner in the works. This spanner appeared in the form of a LoTR-themed pencil case from… oh, around ten years ago? Old, is my point. Most importantly, inside was smuggled so many gel pens. And on top of that, the other day I just had to take a trip down Memory Lane and what did I come across? One of my oldest surviving stories, written in 1999 when I was 11. This particular piece of fanfiction is one of two things I’ve written that’s just stayed with me over the years. You know how you can point to something and say, “That’s the first thing I did where a lot of the stuff I do now first appeared”? This is one of those stories. Among a lot of other things, it’s the origin of my love for colourful writing tools, because it was the first time I wrote with… you guessed it… gel pens.

So do I use my lovely new Kaweco and Rhodias? Or do I give in to my nostalgia for days and stories gone by, whisk all those decade-old gel pens into my holder and buy myself a nice cheap pair of A5 spiral-bound hardcover notepads?

It really doesn’t help that one of my relatives has exactly the same kind of notebook as I wrote that fanfic in, just lying around here somewhere: a fat violet strip down one side of the cover and the rest taken up with a tasteful floral design with little dark red roses with their stems growing to form huge diamonds over a cream background.

(What? I said it was pointless agonising, didn’t I…)

Changes to the Plan

As in, there will be no plan. My badge will be switched accordingly.

This is the summary of my original idea…

—

Blood Tells (working title)
Four years after her sister was officially declared dead, a package arrives for Molly Machicek. It contains simply a tape, in which Hannah details a mysterious illness and relates her encounters with a representative of something called the Dynasty.

It sounds crazy, but she senses there’s more to it than that. Unfortunately for Molly, her innocent search for answers soon tangles her in a world she never knew existed, and a society in which obedience and birthright reign supreme. It’s a world she discovers she has more than a passing connection to…

With a killer in blue stalking her, it’s only a matter of time before something gives. The mysterious Lucas Meyers acts as her ally, but he has his own motives and Molly knows that when he achieves his aims, he won’t be standing at her side. Still, forewarned is forearmed… right?

Somewhere out there, Hannah Machicek is living under Dynasty control, the one woman who could solve all their problems – and Molly is starting to feel sick. She’ll find her sister and she’ll get her truth, Lucas and the Dynasty be damned.

—

This hasn’t worked out. There are so very many reasons, namely:

1. My mind keeps ‘nope’-ing out of it. As nitpicky as it sounds, I have a specific idea of the characters and organisations in this thing, and this plot just feels wrong on them. I can’t think of it and not feel it. The other fact contributing deserves its very own category, so –
2. I can’t make this work. While I seem to have some weird knack for plotting thrillers and summarising stories in a way that makes them sound like thrillers, my actual experience with writing thrillers… is zero. I have no idea how to make it work (Point A, B and C are fine, but how do I get there without being boring?!), and with the characters and organisation pulling me in all different directions… it’s not so much that genre is a problem. It’s that I can’t make all these things fit. I’m a wise writer; I know my limitations, and throwing myself headfirst into most of them during NaNo is not a good way to improve myself or up the wordcount.
3. My planning skills are too rusty. I’ve been semi-planning novel attempts and pantsing short and flash fictions for so long I’ve honestly forgotten how much it takes to plan a novel (also, I’ve never had to plan on this scale). Last week, I looked at my cards and nearly freaked. Act I and parts of Acts II and III were done… but I couldn’t make it stretch. Concentrating on the plot itself, there was no room for subplots and the plan had never allowed for any (at least that one’s changeable), which kind of adds to my second point above. I could get two acts in… except that most of my points are in Act I. I can kind of see how to smooth it all out, but… I just don’t have enough to go around. Which leads me to –
4. I don’t have time to untangle this. Literally – recent events have pretty much shrunk my time to a quarter of the day, and during that time I have ‘spring cleaning’ to get done, home stress to deal with, chores to do, and also I’d kind of like to relax at some point. I don’t have the emotional energy to sit down and be relaxed enough to re-organise what I’ve already got while adding in new characters and new plans to fatten it out and sweeten it up (also, harking back to the second point… I have no idea how to put in new characters and subplots without slowing down everything else. I’ve tried, but this story is stubbornly one-track – none of my subplot-inserting tricks work).

Can I sort it out eventually? Yes. Will I? Probably not. But it would make an interesting seed for a story that doesn’t hit my worst points. So this year I will be writing… drumroll please…

No drumroll? Fine.

NOTHING.

Or more accurately…

I DON’T KNOW 🙂

All I know is, I’ll be pantsing short stories and flash fiction – after all, it’s (almost) what I’m best at!

More information to come, er, sometime?

The Surprises of Planning Pt. 1

So I guess technically planning can extend to writing a synopsis too, right? Because that’s something else I feel the need to discuss… but before I start all that, one question: why is it called planning? My fingers want to type ‘plotting’ so bad I usually only notice when I type the ‘t’, because apparently my mind agrees. Maybe they figure it’s planning like a building or town event, and plotting like world domination, the apocalypse, and putting characters through seven shades of hell for the entertainment of any readers I might eventually get? Hmm. Either way, I wish they’d stop it. It’s not like the plot is the only thing that gets planned…

Anyway, I’m usually pretty good with the synopses. This year, however… I’m feeling finicky about mine, and the weird thing is, the one addition which would improve it is precisely the thing I’m trying to keep out of it: spoilers. Please to read in River Song’s voice. Since this one is being planned, I’m trying to keep a little mystery somewhere… even if technically, there’s still a lot of it in my plan.

My plans aren’t finished, but I managed to outline Chapter One – another difference, usually I write exclusively in scenes, but this forces me to think more structurally. The funny thing is, I’m not so much afraid it’ll rob it of the mystery and magically steal away my creativity, as I am afraid that it’ll work. Why? It sounds so stupid, but it’s something new and entirely different. What if I’m better at this? I’ll be stuck as a planner forever! NOOOOOOO – *ahem* I like being able to rush into a story and see where it takes me. That’s what I usually do. It’s only for NaNo that I stop and create a synopsis and worry about things like the title and a tagline for my profile and maybe a character sketch or cover… you know, I’m that kind of writer.

I wasn’t always.

No, don’t worry, I’m not about to relate some past experience of planning gone horribly wrong, that forever scarred me and made me dread the very concept of the evil… ‘planning’. No. The thing is, I actually began as a planner… my daydreams were the blueprints of the stories I wanted to write, and I’d create characters and a setting, and decide what was going to happen in this daydream. I had all my facts, and the characters had their purposes, before I let my imagination go. Figuring it all out first was fun.

But to cut a long story short, pantsing? EVEN MORE FUN! And much less worry and consumed time. It’s become my default over the past what, decade or so…

But apart from that, it’s the planning itself that worries me. Writing a synopsis is one thing, but planning the itself… my process is basically as follows:

1. Decide what I’m writing.
2. Write synopsis.
3. Get down to the nitty-gritty with index cards.

And the organisation of it basically comes down to the three-act structure, with the cards then being grouped into whatever smaller group fits. Like I said, Chapter One (Act I) is ready to go, as is the scene which introduces the secondary antagonist – I figure that’s either the last chapter of Act I or the very beginning of Act II. Not sure which, but probably I. Act I is basically Molly making enough of a nuisance of herself that the Dynasty finally notice, which that scene details, and it’s the first hint we get that Lucas is dangerous, too… something that’ll come back to bite Molly in Act III.

It’s intimidating having to sit down and work out what happens, scene by scene, and organising all that into a coherent narrative. I did plan like that once before (long ago) but didn’t get much figured out, for precisely that reason. It’s difficult when you’re not used to thinking that way, but at the same time, it brings cohesiveness and continuity to the story… and just having an outline gives you something to act as motivation as well as sort of guidelines. It’s just getting it all down first up is hard.

Ironically, that’s part I thought wouldn’t be as hard as the other notable thing about planning… the balance. Trying to be firm enough to have a solid, working outline with nothing neglected and everything in its place, while simultaneously leaving it open enough to leave me room to manoeuvre and not be trapped on the page by all the stuff I’ve got planned. I thought it would be the worst thing, but it’s actually quite easy! The trick is using the skeleton, writing out only what’s needed. That means mostly bigger-picture stuff, but sometimes a detail is needed, too. You need a certain amount of trees to make a forest, after all.

And the last thing… it surprised me how good I felt about it when I finished sequencing the first chapter. It’s an odd thing, but it’s really satisfying to get some progress made, even if it’s only on a small handful of index cards…

Hmm, it just occurred to me that probably I should have posted about my NaNovel before I posted this. Eh, soon. Soon…