Looking Back on NaNoWriMo

Today is the last day of the month, and my 15,740 words certainly won't get me a winner's certificate. I've essentially given up, and that's for a lot of different reasons, actually.

First of all, the past month has sort of been a wreck. October 30's car accident led to back pain for a week or so. I started my job at Target on the 4th, and they've been giving me LOTS of hours. I also got sick, which totally knocked me out for a few days, and then I had a bad reaction to NyQuil (which I took for the aforementioned cold) that put me in the hospital for tons of tests I can't afford. Feeling your heart beat 3-4 times per second is worth getting checked out, though, I guess.

The Devil's Blade was also not the novel I was going to write. I was planning a romance set in the 1970's with a farm boy and a kinda-sorta hippie girl. My back-up plan was to write a prequel to Among the People Lost that follows Solstice and Blaze in their time before Dante meets them. Then, on the day I started writing, I remembered this story. I remembered that I started to rewrite it and never really did anything with it, and I decided to give it a go.

Honestly, it started off okay. I realized pretty quickly, though, that NaNo just doesn't cater to my writing style. I don't like doing drafts. I like putting tons of time and thought into every sentence, making the story as good as I can on my first try, then going through after a few months of a break and looking for areas to improve. This whole write-tons-and-fix-it-later thing is just not for me.

I'm not someone who can let things go until later, either. I confuse myself if I put off research and make up a filler detail. I'd rather take the time to do my research and figure out what I'm doing beforehand.

I feel like my character development is severely lacking. That's something that I need to really sit down and figure out, because right now, it's going nowhere. Valdius is interesting, but not really interesting. Anastera, my main female, has about as much dimension as a sheet of paper. She has a history and abilities, but minimal personality. I never know how to write her dialogue. The best character I have right now is my imp Zirk. He's totally okay and needs, like, no work. It's really pathetic that that's how things progressed.

For now, I'm shelving the story for a few months so I can look back on it with a fresh mind. In the mean time, I'll finish off my Among the People Lost prequel I started that follows Dante and Hunter. I put it on hold for NaNo, and now that I've taken a break from it, I'm ready to get back into it and pump out the rest of it.

I'll keep posting writing tips periodically. I have quite a few more that I think will be fun to share. I'm hoping I can more or less return to the internet now that I'm over my cold. It's been a rough month. 

Writing Without Experience

When I wrote Among the People Lost, I did something interesting in that I used locations I was familiar with. I've been to Baltimore, and I live right near Scranton. I already knew what those places were like. It's set in the not-too-distant future, so I didn't have to worry about researching tons of things to get a feel for the time period.

Scranton, I love you and hate you.

The story I'm going to be writing for NaNoWriMo is entirely different. I'm starting it off in the small town of Lanesboro, Iowa in the summer of 1974. Lanesboro is so small that all the info Wikipedia has on it can fit on the screen of my laptop at once. I don't even know if it existed in 1974! I've certainly never been there. We're talking middle of freaking nowhere, and that is exactly how I want it.

Furthermore, being born in 1991 makes it a little tough to know what life was like in the 70s. I feel like I'm totally out of my element on this one, and I hope I can get all the information I need before I start writing. I already put a lot of effort in to finding names that were popular in the years my characters were born.

Mostly, I'm just winging it and hoping it flows really well. It won't hit 50,000 words if it doesn't, so here goes nothing! 

NaNoWriMo

There's this thing referred to as NaNoWriMo, which means National Novel Writing Month. You have 30 days to write a minimum 50,000 word novel.

I'll be adapting this short story I wrote a little while back into a full novel. First person, general fiction centered around a romantically-driven plot, set in the 1970's or somewhere around there, and without any deadly diseases, dragons, burning buildings, or magic!

This is gonna be tough.