Wednesday, November 29, 2017

NaNoWriMo 2017: Achieved

Somehow, i managed to complete the challenge. Last night around 10:30, I checked the word count on the official website, and it came to 50,017. I think I will try to sleep tonight.

Future plan: I have a list of To Do items, that need to be completed before I will be willing to call what I have a draft. When those are fine, I will set the manuscript aside for a month or 2 before trying to turn it into something that's not painful to read, then get it to some better readers for comment.

Saturday, November 4, 2017

I never thought I’d try

A bunch of years ago — more than 15, I think — I first heard about NaNoWriMo, National Novel Writing Month. The basic idea is to slam out 50,000 words in the month of November. It seemed like a great idea for those who had time. Back then, I definitely didn’t have time.

But now, it seems, I do. Wednesday, November 1, 2017, I mentioned to my wife that I was thinking about doing it. She said words to the effect of “go ahead.” (I don’t remember her exact words.)

I thought, “Why not?”

But there were 2 problems:

  1. I have a WIP (work in progress), the next Mason & Penfield Mystery. It has been a matter of fits and starts for the last 5 years. At that rate, I couldn’t finish a 3-question multiple-choice test in a month.
  2. I write slowly. This meant that unless I had a definite plan (outline), I knew I had no chance.
So I have set aside the WIP. (Sorry Mason & Penfield fans, both of you. You’ll just have to wait.)

And I created an outline. But it’s not the kind of outline you imagine. When I hear “outline,” I think about a business-oriented document that’s more like a table of contents. This is not what I created. And I didn’t create it cold. I finally found outlining advice that was useful in this YouTube playlist. There are 5 videos, each about 10 minutes long. They are taken from a talk given by a successful author, Dan Wells, and he shows by example from stories you’ve read or seen on the screen how successful storytelling is structured.

So on Wednesday, November 1, 2017 (after talking with my wife), I sat down to create an outline, and did so. It took about 6 hours to complete. And since it was almost 2:00 a.m. on the 2nd of November, I went to bed. I was already a day behind. But today, the 4th, I completed my 3rd day of writing, and each of these days I got out more than 2,000 words. It’s just possible I can make it.

What is this new story? It’s a murder mystery (surprise!) set in the year 2101, in a beautiful dystopia. The victim is a wealthy, elderly woman, and the primary suspect is her caregiver. The tentative (and poor) title is Murder In the Future.

We’ll see whether anything comes of it.

Update 2017-11-15

As of last night, I have about 23,000 words written. Including November 1, I have missed (almost) 3 days. On the nights I have been able to work (drat that pesky day job!), I’ve managed about 2,000 words across about 4 hours. That means that tonight (assuming the pattern holds), I will be exactly halfway through 50,000 words exactly halfway through the month. Not too awful.