Well, it’s just gone midday on November the 9th, and I’m about 36,200 words into the NaNoWriMo story. As the NaNoWriMo benchmark is theoretically 50,000 words for a win, it would seem I am way ahead of schedule. On the other hand, I’m only roughly a third of the way through the idea (plot seems like too strong a word for it) I came up with – possibly a bit less than that, though I don’t know exactly what’s going to happen in the rest of the book.
I’ve reached the end of the first part, though – the three-act structure is just one of the most obvious ways in which this story is a loving rip-off of The Kraken Wakes – and I’m about to skip forward quite a few years in story-time. Therefore, I feel it’s appropriate to take a bit of a break at this point (not too long, I still have 1634 words to do today), and so I can feel like I’m working on it even while I’m not I thought I would reflect on the process so far.
Well. From my point of view I’m finding it a bit easier to knuckle down and work this year – last Autumn days would go by when I did nothing but cruise the internet playing online games and watching strange clips on YouTube and DailyMotion, but I’ve done at least 2000 words every day, normally more than 4000, and on day four (when things really seemed to be flowing well) over 6500. It’s easy to get jazzed early on when everything is still fresh and interesting, but you do reach a point after about a week when self-doubt rears its ugly head, and it’s here that you just have to start plugging away regardless in the hope that some spark of life still inhabits the story – it almost always does, if you dig deep enough.
From the story’s point of view, everything seems to be ticking over. There has been a bit more sex than I’d expected (tastefully off-screen, before you ask), no-one has died, and all the characters are behaving roughly as planned. The problem with writing without an outline, as I tend to do, is that after a while you realise you don’t really know who any of these people are. While to some degree they will show you this as you proceed, I do suspect some judicious rewrites of early chapters (when they were still deciding who they were) will become necessary if this story is to go anywhere beyond my hard-drive. One character who I wrote in just to give the main person someone to talk to decided to make a bit for power and ended up becoming much more important and likeable than I expected, to the point of marrying the main person. Somebody else turned out to be much less sympathetic than I’d anticipated, but still a key figure. The character I’d half-expected to become everyone else’s mentor vanished without a trace after chapter six. Nearly everyone went off to Alaska for four or five chapters, which was a surprise, and I had to cold-email a NaNoWriMo writer there for some local details (they were very obliging).
I am still concerned that the dialogue is often crushingly obvious and expository, and that the balance between the relationships between the characters and the ongoing problem with the sky is not quite as it should be. But on the whole I am fairly happy with things and can’t think of a more fulfilling way to have spent the last week or so.
On to chapter twenty – and someone’s going to die! (Bwa ha ha ha.)
No Chic. Just Geek. 
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