Friday, October 30, 2015

What, What Do You Mean It's Oct 30th?

NaNoWriMo starts in two days.

I am not prepared.

That is all.

...

...

...

No, that's not all, really. True, I'm not prepared, but it's been difficult to get ready. I'm rebelling this year. You remember how at the beginning of the year- well, maybe not, you guys have better things to store in your long-term memory than my blog posts. So here's this post: Evicting Eventually. Goal 1, I completed on the last possible day. Goal 2, done. A day late, but done. Goal 3...

Flop. Flop flop flop. Like a fish on land. Floppity flop. Goal 4, I didn't even attempt. I'm the kind of person where if one thing gets away from me, I'm bad about getting the rest of the list done.

But I'm not giving up. Yeah, goal 5 is pretty far right now. Three novels completed in two months? And one of those months is December? Ha. Haha. No way. But I can still do two. At least, that's my NaNo goal. I've got two novels 50k done. One, Trickster's Gambit, just needs an incomplete scene completed, the climax, and the ending. Maybe 10k to go. The rest of it is pretty good, I think. Mostly on track.

The other, The Business of Being Dead, is going to take a lot more work. While writing it, I got lost. I rambled and hemmed and hawed and backtracked and ended up at a climax where the heroes couldn't win. They didn't have the knowledge to defeat the bad guy, and the bad guy didn't have the ability to beat the heroes. Stalemate in the last 2000 words. The current plan is to scrap it back to the "shit hits the fan" moment and go from there with a new plan. My problem is that the plan has only barely begun to come together. I'm likely going to end up plotting like the buffer bar on a slow-loading video: just barely keeping ahead of the work. With some luck and a lot of praying, I'll end up at a much better climax, where the bad guy has almost won, but the heroes seize victory from the jaws of defeat at the last second and get to a satisfactory The End. I suppose only time will tell now. If I can have two complete novels at the end of the next month, whether I wrote 50k or not, I'll consider myself a winner.

And I don't like to lose.

1 comment:

  1. I related to this post way too well. I'm not even sure if I should be attempting NaNo this year, because I have so little free time -- grad school applications are consuming me!

    But I'm pretty impressed that you're doing two novels, and have finished ones you've worked on! I've reached the 50k, but my novels never got to an actual end.

    Good luck to both of us!

    ReplyDelete