Commit or be Committed

I want to thank everyone on facebook who posted their comments on which story I should write. I like all three and hope to write each of them eventually, but I think I've chosen my poison—so to speak.

I had all but decided on the Hell gate story which a majority of you seemed to prefer, and had even done some pre-writing, but eventually decided against it. Those characters just weren't ready to be written yet. I ended up going instead with story #3. Digging through my notes, I'd already written two short stories pulled from this story idea (though I had swapped the characters around and changed their names) so it seems my subconscious just felt there was more meat there to work it. (Yeah I know it probably means I'm committing myself to another 100k work. Yes I should be committed.)

I've tweaked my synopsis and even worked up some cover art for the curious. You can see them both at my writer's profile page on the nano site at: http://www.nanowrimo.org/eng/user%252F200847 just click on the Novel Info tab.

Wish me luck. The roller-coaster is nearly at the top of the first hill. The anticipation is already killing me.

Preparing for NaNo 2010

I need help. NaNoWriMo 2010 is right around the corner and I need help deciding what I'm going to write.

I know I haven't posted on this blog much (and yes ddo going free to play is part of the reason and yes I'm afraid/excited about Lord of the Rings Online goes F2P--who doesn't want to go running around the shire, or the mines of Moria, or Helmsdeep, or Minas Tirith, or...) but I have been working on the writing...some. I've even received my proof copy of The Ascent from NaNo '09 which I'll post picture of here in a bit.

But back to my problem. After writing two 100K+ novels and not having any time to edit them, I thought I'd write a YA novel in the 50-65K range. (I'm trying to buy time here.) I've got three rough ideas to choose between and I'm putting it up for a vote. (I realize most of the replies will be on facebook, but you can also reply on this blog.) I'm working on more detailed synopses, but until then, these are the thumbnail sketches:

Story#1 Good girl must do bad things to rescue family after zombie apocalypse.

Story#2 Boy must take over his eccentric family's vocation guarding one of the seven Hell-gates to save cursed girlfriend.

Story#3 Rejected apprentice discovers plot to infiltrate mages' guild and develops knew form of combat to stop half-dragon shapeshifters.

I refer to #1 as The Breakfast Club meets Dawn of the Dead. It would probably be the easiest to write.

#2 I sometimes refer to as the Adams Family story. Much more character driven and harder to get right but could be very fun. It was originally intended to be a horror romance (horror more like Poe and Lovecraft than modern slashers and romance more like P.G. Wodehouse than common bodice rippers.)

#3 is a pretty straight-forward fantasy story. The thumbnail synopsis doesn't really do it justice since a lot of it involves the main characters trying to track down a mysterious group assassinating mages. This one would probably require more work to plot out than the others.

So which is it--or do you have a better idea? I'm open to suggestions, but I've got to decide in the next four weeks and start marking out scenes as soon as possible.

NaNoWriMo 2009 = 51329

I had a nice thoughtful post mostly written all about this year's NaNoWriMo and lessons learned and all that and, quite frankly, even the idea bores me.

In some ways this year went better than last. I certainly felt more prepared. In other ways it was a little more of a struggle. I think I'll go back to gritty hard-core fantasy next year. I also think I'll do more pre-writing so I can hit the ground running even faster.

Including the stuff I wrote before NaNoWriMo, I have somewhere around 80,000 words so far. This means I only have about 20,000 left to finish the story.

At this point in the story, I've adapted everything in Xenophon's account up to the greeks' journey through western Armenia. Next I have to decide how much of their wanderings through the Greek frontier and the political machinations that follow I can squeeze into the space I have left. I also have to figure out how they find out about the aliens' plan (in my adaptation) to attack the now defenseless Earth.

(Yeah, I decided the story needed to end with more of a bang. Xenophon's account just kind of trails off with the break up of the army, it's partial reformation and his hand-off of the troops to the Spartans. I decided to make his little excursion where he captures the rich Persian a little more significant though it will, unfortunately, lose all the humor Xenophon had in his version.)

Week 3.5 An Interesting Discovery

I was going through my posts cleaning things up and discovered this incomplete post from NaNo 2009. Even though it's not complete, I thought I'd go ahead and hit the publish button. The tension between character-driven and plot-driven stories is still something I wrestle with.

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There are many ways to divide people up. One way to divide writers is between those who write character-based stories and those that write plot-based stories. I have long wanted to be the former type, but have secretly feared I might be the latter.

Plot-based stories tend to be pretty exciting. Lots of things happen and the story keep moving along, but the characters don't necessarily change much and in the end you're left with something entertaining, but not necessarily meaningful. They're often the types of books or movies you enjoy once, but probably won't care to read/watch again.

Character-based stories tend to move a little more slowly. You get into the whys and wherefores so that learning the character's background and motivation--why the character is going what they're doing--is at least as important as what they are doing.

I have long enjoyed character based stories, particularly quirky characters like those in the works of P.G. Wodehouse's stories or Gormenghast by Mervyn Peake. (For this I blame an early exposure to the works of James Blaylock and his friend Tim Powers.) I also particularly like (and this will expose the truly pedestrian nature of my tastes) the method of character reveal in some of the better anime like Trigun and Cowboy Bebop. (Here I'm talking about the anime, I haven't read the manga yet.) I particularly like the reveal/transformation of Vash's character in Trigun.

But... I've long feared I lean more toward the plot-based type stories in my writing. Part of that, I think, just comes with maturity. When I was younger, it was all about the action. Also, I didn't like hurting my characters. (I think a lot of young writers start off writing Mary Sue type characters to some degree.) Having grown older, I can now appreciate implications of character that probably escaped me when I was younger.

So what does all this have to do with NaNoWriMo?

This story is more of a plot story and I'm having more trouble with it than last year. I spent half the book just leading up to the war when most adaptations of the Anabasis begin about the time Cyrus gets killed. Why did I do that? It's because there were all this cool interpersonal tensions between the generals and the Greeks and the Persians as well as the fact that Cyrus was obviously lying to them as he led them to Persia.

At this point the Greeks are marching towards home. They've just left Persia and are halfway through Kurdistan. Now don't get me wrong, there's still plenty of interpersonal conflict, but there's just so much more plot to get through. (Xenophon himself describes their trek through Kurdistan as seven days of non-stop fighting.)

Week 3 Down and Moving Into the Final Stretch

This week has been a bit of a struggle. Although I've stayed well above the running total I should have for each day, I haven't always done my full 1667 for the day. For some reason the word widget at the side of the blog isn't showing the three days at the end of the week where I came up short. As a result, my cushion of words has dropped a little.

Story wise, I'm well into the "mushy middle". However, because the story naturally has a nice plot twist around the true middle, for me its more like a "mushy three-quarters".

Sudden disaster has led to political conflict and unexpected betrayal. Now Kenneth Phon has to step up and get the fleet back home. At this point they're wandering around deep in alien territory just trying to find a way out and have just learned their best option may be through the territory of a backwards race so aggressive that even the empire won't mess with them.

Ironically, the thing that's holding me up in this story, is not what you would expect. Perhaps I'll blog about it tomorrow. I'm taking all of next week off so I can try to power through the 50k mark. I may just have time to blog this before the end of the week.

Week 2 Down, Week 3 Begun

This is where things often get hard. Story wise one tends to be stuck in the muddy middle. NaNoWriMo wise, this is also where the lack of sleep starts to catch up to you. Yes, I miss my free time and I miss my family time, but to tell you the truth at this point I mostly miss my bed time. I've had a couple of days where I really just wanted to say screw the writing, I'm just going to take a 12 hour nap. But, so far, I've managed to gut it out.

I crossed the halfway mark two days early and I'm within two or three hundred words of the 2/3 mark. Assuming disaster doesn't strike, I should cross that tomorrow, two and a half days early. Sure, I could probably do that tonight but, A) I'm going to bed as soon as I post this and B) I just ended a scene at a major turning point and if I start the next scene I probably won't stop for a couple thousand words at which time I'm sure it will be well past midnight.

I know a few of you sick and twisted people are thinking, "So, when am I going to get to see this thing?" Well, the answer is probably not for a long while. But if you really are morbidly curious, I posted the first chapter on my profile at http://www.nanowrimo.org/eng/user/200847

I should warn you that it is a VERY ROUGH first draft. Also, it begins a little weird, but then you should expect that from me by now.

Starting Week 2

Well I've completed week 1 with a mostly unqualified success. I had a couple of days where I failed to meet my goal of 1667 words, but I've always at least kept the running word total above what it needed to be for the day. You can largely ignore the "word widget" at the side of my blog. It should read 14,448 as of the date of this posting, but it's at least a couple of days behind. It took them over a month to even get it working, but it is apparently still not correct.

It's probably just the normal tricks of memory, but it seems like this story is resisting me a little more than the last two nano projects. This despite the fact that the story is already pretty much laid out for me. In some ways I've been living with this story for decades. Perhaps that's why this story feels more like a re-write than a discovery draft. Still, the only reason I even made goal tonight was because I already had the next scene well mapped out. At least I don't have to stare at a blinking cursor and wonder what comes next. I just have to figure out how I'm going to get to the next scene.

The big battle has just begun and Kennth Phon's (Xenephon) employer, the alien "Shines Like the Sun" (Cyrus the younger) looks to be winning. I've completely manufactured an incident in the battle (since the real Xenephon hardly mentions his role until after the disaster befalls them) that would be worthy of a good action movie's opening stunt. Let's hope I don't introduce any plot complications I'll later regret.