Monday, November 18, 2013

NaNoWriMo 2013 Mid-Way Update.

This is a few days late. It was written on the 15th but I started to fall asleep at the keyboard before publishing (oops). I've gone through and updated some of the numbers to match the new publish date of the 17th.

We're half-way through NaNoWriMo for those of you who are doing it with me. I'm a few hundred words behind pace (Update: I've since caught up), which is an achievement considering how quickly I got behind at the beginning of the month.

As I noted in my last blog update, this year's NaNo is a real experiment for me, and it created some interesting challenges.

First: It's a totally new story, not another book in the story that I've already written. As a result, my outline was sparse and my sense of characters very light. I've stated before that I'm an agile outliner, allowing for vast and sweeping changes to a relatively detailed outline. This time around the outline is a bare-bones skeleton, and I'm doing a fair bit more seat-of-the-pants than I'm used to. Revisions should be fun.

Second: It's a historical urban fantasy in a relatively well-documented place, in a relatively well-documented period, with a protagonist from an incredibly well-documented family. Take all these knowns and start adding in fantasy elements of the secret-history type. It's a bit of a nightmare and I spent the first week fact-checking everything. That certainly didn't help my word-count. I've learned to let more go and use notes to myself to fill in details later.

Third: I'm writing in first person past tense. Past tense? Easy enough. First person? That was a hell of a learning curve. We speak and live our lives in first person all the time (unless you're one of those twonks who refers to themselves in third person). It should be easy, but when you're trying to write a compelling story from the perspective of a person that doesn't exist outside of your head. Plus there's a lot of I's and Me's and We's in there and you can't start every sentence with a first person pronoun or it gets old fast.

All told I'm feeling good about the story and making good time. I still struggle with First Person POV from time to time, and get lost in research over the smallest things (oh, this will just take a minute), but I'm learning, and making good progress.

I have another blog post that I'm working on for the end of the month covering all the various tools (such as Scrivener) and tricks (such as speech-to-text for notes) I've used this month, as my toolset is a bit different than the previous two years.

I want to give a shout out to my NaNo Writing Buddies who have already completed NaNo (well ahead of schedule):
Jason Cantrell: 90,913!
Angi Nicole: 63,975!
GypsyLuc: 61,622!
HeatherxMarie: 52,737!
Scarlett9284: 50,282!
And last but not least, my brother Cysec: with 50,355 words, and completed NaNo for the first time this year (and also early).

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