I win NaNoWriMo!
Two long days of writing, and a big push for the end. I didn’t really even plan to cross the finish line yesterday: my goal was 47,000 words, but I hit that at around 4pm. Then I realized I had the whole rest of the day, and nothing else planned–so I went for it. And a huge thanks to Larisa, who literally cheered me on as I was getting my way across the goal line.
So! Here’s the finish-line celebration breakdown:
First sentence: The dossier called him a difficult case.
Winning sentence: “I’m glad you’re awake,” he said. (I find this amusingly appropriate given my state at the time I finally finished. Did I mention that the night before Larisa and I were up eight times with the baby?)
Best sentence of the night: But on every side, thick cables like severed tendons slithered across the floor.
Of course, this doesn’t mean that the novel itself is done. My private goal is to reach 60,000 words by Nov. 30, then finish the first draft (estimated at 75,000 words) by Dec. 13.
Perfume
Articles like this are why you must read widely, my friends. I have tears in my eyes, now, and I’m thinking about perfume, something that I have seriously never thought about for more than two minutes in my entire life. And the real treat is that I now have a story idea.
Just short
Well, nuts. Last night my goal was to cross the 40,000 word threshold, but I just missed it. I was tired, and I was at the end of the chapter, and I didn’t want to force myself through those last 400 words.
However! This morning I wrote very well and got over the line, though I didn’t actually check my wordcount yet. And I finally got my characters into a long-awaited secret chamber, though the lovebirds have started fighting and things will generally be downhill from here.
Jumping the Rails
At around 30,000 words, the middle of last week, my novel took an unexpected turn. It was something I should have seen coming, but didn’t: once I started writing what I had in my outline, I realized that it was stupid and made no sense. So I wrote something else. This got my stuck and result in a several-day-long slowdown of my work. The whole point of having an outline is to know what I’m doing so that I can write quickly, but this doesn’t work when the outline violates the core premise of the story.
I eventually worked my way out of it and got back onto the outline, though with a missing chapter and a really rough spot that needs to be worked over in editing. My protags got hitched and laid. This means that I’ve passed the logical midpoint of the story, and now I can get to work tearing them apart and destroying everything that they love.
This story is going to be so much longer than 50,000 words.
Nano Halfway
See that progress bar over there? See how it’s suspiciously close to half-full?
That is an optical illusion, children. It is, in fact, just over half full: 25,838 words out of 50,000. It merely appears to be less than half full because of the drop-shadow on the left, and our general inability to visually assess exact ratios.
The novel goes swimmingly. The first 20,000 words ripped right along in the first ten days or so. I stalled slightly getting to 25,000 (which was my goal for Tuesday 11/11, but wasn’t actually met until Thursday 11/13), because I found that I had to stop and explain a great many things, and because my protag was recalcitrant about falling in love with his intended.
However! Things seem to have cleared up between the soon-to-be-happy couple, so I foresee sexy fun times at the end of the chapter, all the better to lead into the mysterious ancient artifacts and world-shattering catastrophe in the latter half of the book.
New goal: 30,000 words by Sunday (11/16) night.
NaNoWriMo Update
Things are rocking. Having an outline of the entire book has been incredibly helpful, as I’m able to charge through the actual scene-setting without having to stop and worry about what happens next. I’ve discovered something about my writing process: actually putting words on the page is the easy part for me, the fun part. The plotting is the hard part: I usually start with a very vague beginning and a very vague ending for my stories, and I spend all of my time trying to figure out how to get from A to B. If I do all of the plotting up front, then the writing itself is a breeze.
Anyway, I was at about 8,000 words this morning, and by this evening I expect to break 10K. Two days early! W00t!
Mongol Spam
Today I got spam advertising a series of very nice apartments in Ulaanbaatar. I have to ask myself: how many people are really interested in moving to Outer Mongolia? I am, obviously, but I think that the real market for such a thing would be rather small.
Subverted Subversion
November 11, 2008 at 2:11 pm (writing) (commentary, fantasies of ritual, short story)
There is a particular type of fantasy story that has at its core an elaborate religious or social ritual, the more shocking and bizarre the better. I mean things like His One True Bride by Darja Malcolm-Clarke, Break the Vessel by Vylar Kaftan, or The Chosen by Ricardo Pinto. The subtext of these stories is usually that the religious beliefs underlying the ritual are false, and that they oppress those that participate in them. The opposite type also exists, in which someone, usually an outsider, derides the poor local superstition and gets his comeuppance for it.
Kingspeaker by Marie Brennan seems to be one of this type, but its conclusion does something amazing with the trope.
(Mild spoilers follow.)
At the opening of the story we see the female protagonist being stripped of her own voice to speak with the voice of the King. This seems at first to be merely ritual–she still speaks, and even speaks to the king, though she insists that she’s only saying the king’s words back to him. At the novel’s climax, though, the king becomes psychologically unable to say what he needs to say, and in a crucial moment the protag decides to speak up without the king’s command.
But notice: the protag doesn’t speak up for herself, which would violate the ritual logic presented in the story. Instead, she speaks in the voice of the king, saying what truly are the king’s words, the words the king cannot bring himself to say. Right at the place where I expected to see the ritual subverted, it was instead affirmed in a dramatic and ironic way. I was tickled with delight.
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