Regular Spelling
Thoughts on language and more

NaNoWriMo Update 2: Keeping Up

Oh right, I was going to try and post an update the other day, but the site was acting funky and I didn't have the time. And I never did post the link to the public share of the document on here (I did post it on Twitter, here it is).  Nearly done with it, still don't have a proper title for the story, just still called the "Third Tier Story". But it is what it is, and what it is now is a much more clear sci-fi story then I was playing it up to the halfway point.

I mentioned last time that as of that point I had planned it up to the halfway point. Once I got to that halfway point, though, it was back to playing it by the seat of my pants, up until Sunday. On Sunday, planning out this last week, I was able to finally plan out where I wanted the last four updates to go (to finish Thursday because I have things to do on Friday), and so most of the last half was once again spur of the moment. Honestly I don't like writing that way because it ends up reading like a screenplay and you can't clearly picture the scenario I'm trying to show. But for this story I've just had to deal with it the whole time, because I did not plan this story ahead. It's all being done live, and so I haven't had enough time to think ahead of time how to portray it clearly.

So here it stands, a fifty thousand word book that's probably not that easy to follow. At some point when I decide to do something more with it heavy revising would be necessary, and it would probably grow to at least half-again that size to double or more in size. When would that happen? Who knows. Probably some distant time where I would have to read the whole thing entirely again to even remember what I wrote, because right now, where I'm not thinking of it first then writing it down afterward, the full details of what's been happening have sure been having a difficult time sticking in my head.

Tue, 27 Nov 2012 16:00:00 -0600

NaNoWriMo Update 1: Aimless?

So to actually post an update on what I've got going on for NaNoWriMo. I'm below par right now, having fully missed two days and getting well under par a third day because of computer crap. I went into this not knowing at all what I was doing, as I mentioned last time picking it at very last minute (literally as I was writing that blog post I found that part of the rules about starting something new), and all it was was a very rough idea that popped into my head months and months ago. Or actually a year ago, according to OneNote, that section was written October 2 of 2011. 

It wasn't even a developed idea either, it was something rough that popped into my head when the newest Van Canto album came out and I was listening to the bonus track A Storm To Come from it. I can remember my thought process, I can tell you that much.  Not that long before that I had been coming up with a new overall setting for writing different stories in and had just hammered out that basic thing, and then one of the times I was listening to that song trying to learn the words, the priest in the beginning giving the funeral gave me the impression that he might be condeming the man (which he's not, really, if you read through the official lyrics with the action description, he's just reading a sermon from the Bible). But from there I got the idea of a power mad priest, and some opposition to his position, and went from there.

While I've of course posted on here my progress in writing stories as I've written them, even with The Pocketwatch I had more idea of where I was going than I do here. All I had in these notes were four characters and their very generalized motives, and that's it. No other plot and otherwise, so I really have just been wandering as I've written so far. Cranking up my realtime self-writing all the way up, I've just typed and typed to see what came out, hoping for something that would work. It's incredibly speech heavy, almost to the point of a thinly veiled play more than a book, because that's the way I think when I write stories by running storylines in my head: I let the stories write themselves, driven by how the characters act and react with each other. There's very little environment description or detail, but that can be done later when cleaning it up.

Now, after a number of days of writing, I have finally come to the point where I have an overall plot. Or at least, half of one, anyway. I've got where I want to go up until the midway of the story. The second half can come later, but now that I have an idea of where this will be going, it will come later, I'm not at the point where I have to worry about it anymore. I'm where I need to be, I know where I'm going, and I can get there now. So by the end of this weekend I should be caught back up to par, and once I am, I'll share out the document publically so it can be read as I work.

Thu, 08 Nov 2012 15:00:00 -0600