Final Nanowrimo

Update 26 29 Nov-5 Dec 2021

Well, this week started out shaky and then came to a halt. But I managed to finish Nanowrimo! I had hoped to write more, faster, and end on a higher note. But real life is a thing and we all have to write around holidays, family issues, health, and day jobs… (unless we’re the luck rare writer who exists solely on their writing? I know a LOT of writers and very few of them don’t have a regular job).

Not to Bury the Lede

Gonna take a moment and talk about another topic very quickly and then we’ll get back to the writing. Most of you know I write this over the weekend and schedule it in advance. By the time this goes live on Monday morning I should just be getting home from a quick out patient surgery. Should go off without a problem.

That said, I realize that my writing time this weekend, and probably at the beginning of next week (Monday morning is actually my most productive writing time of the week) will not happen. My novel is going to stall for a bit.

I’m hoping that I can take this time and maybe start working on the next book in the series. Start scoping out the man story arcs and working on the characters to a deeper level. I might just sit back and try to draw better maps for this book. Ha ha. I don’t know.

Back on Topic

Words for the week. As mentioned, this past week started out a little week. I was suffering from a cold and still dealing with the other health concerns. I managed two short writing sessions. That still nearly hit my weekly word goal. 5,778 new words were added to one very long, vignette style chapter. This brought my Nanowrimo goal to 50,123 total words, and the manuscript itself at 113,825.

I currently have my end goal set at 150k but I think this book will easily hit 200k. And originally in version 1 and 2 I put that as my goal. But in the revamped version 3 I had removed several povs and about 6 chapters, so I thought I could easily come in under 200k. Alas, I ended taking more time with the previous chapters and lavishing more attention on the setting.

What’s Happening in the Book?

I’m gearing up for one of the major action set pieces that happens over multiple chapters. This week’s writing was a bunch of vignettes showcasing the various characters and how they spent a few days of rest.

Since up to this point the story has mostly been in two strong povs, this allowed me to hop around into characters who have never had a pov chapter and give you their true internal thoughts instead of the filtered ideas of the observing character. I didn’t do anything ground breaking, but I think I gave a better look at the motives and goals of these other characters who for the most part have been dragged along by the other main characters.

Also, from this point forward the characters end up broken into smaller groups and scattered a lot. So many of the chapters are going to continue with multiple pov shifts for the entire last half of the book. Which is how I used to write all of my novels.

More Thesis Talk

I know I have a 55-part blog on my original thesis that precedes this series of blogs, and I know that a handful of you have actually read through that entire blog to get to here (and I love you for that).

But I’m going to talk about my previous novel for a little bit for the newbies (and also because my nerves are up this morning and I want to keep writing for a bit to ignore them).

I started this whole website for a class in my undergrad, to try and have a stable web presence and it was mostly about gaming and trying to do a gaming related story. That was fun but also a little weird as I did it half in character and half out.

Then in my grad school classes I had a class that was all about messaging and later one about branding. And I decided that I wanted my weekly blog to be something that helped other writers and showcased my struggles with writing.

(though I guess if I really wanted to showcase my struggles I should probably talk more about anxiety, not looking for paying gigs, not writing shorts when I know there are antho openings I could try for, not keeping up with my agent hunt—5 letters sent, 2 rejections, 3 silent—five more letters ready to go, 10 need to be written, and most of my agents I want to query are closed—the point is, I could probably be trying a LOT harder to make money writing, and probably should be doing more. I’m not, but I am trying to stay true to writing every week, and I am trying to stay true to you dear readers.)

Back on track. I started writing a thesis blog, where I was racing against a deadline to finish my thesis. And by putting up my word count every week and counting down to deadline, I held myself accountable and got the work done.

I then kept going with the posts showing my revision and feedback, and then my final rewrite for my classes.

Where is this going, why is he talking about the old Blog?

The point was to talk about that previous novel, and I got a little side tracked.

My thesis novel was a bit of a departure for me. I never really paid attention to the style of my books when I wrote in my teens and early twenties. Normally I was just telling the story of a single character as they went through a portion of their life. I DO notice that a lot of my books tend to be travelogue/ quest type structures. I like to take characters from A to B to C and end up around M or further. No matter if I’m writing horror, fantasy… hell I even put together the first chapter of a romance novel and it still was about a couple traveling from A to B for the bulk of the novel.

But I’m digressing again.

The point was, that when I came back to writing after a break of over 10 years, I started writing stories about groups of people. No longer was I writing about the loner hero, or the main hero with a bunch of supporters. Now I was writing about larger groups of equal heroes, all main characters in their own minds. Each deserving of some stage time.

But for some reason I didn’t know how to handle all of these povs.

My thesis novel was about 5 main characters, all traveling to the same place, along similar but different routes. So, I wrote that novel where every chapter was a strict single pov and rotated through the various povs to tell the story.

The POV Problem

The current manuscript is chock full of characters. In the first version I tried to do two povs in the two main storyline groups (4 total) and I had villain POVs that revealed things in the back ground that came in every third of fifth chapter.

This didn’t work out well as it dragged out cliff hangers and stretched out the story over a lot of pages. (This problem also existed in my thesis novel, but in that case all of the characters were in close proximity to each other and sometimes together. So, I could cliffhanger one characters view of a scene and in the very next shift to the next character who was near enough to show the cliffhanger from another direction.

I tried to Pharaoh’s Gambit with the strict cycle of povs and it just sucked so much. So, I had to return to my older methods, and I’m much happier writing in this style. For the most part the book is told from a handful of povs and then from the mid-point on, the groups get re-divided and the tone shifts.

The first half of the book is very reactionary. Our heroes are on the run, trying to figure things out, and just ‘reacting’ to everything. But at the current mid-point of the story, they have dug in their heels and turned around and they are tired of reacting. They want to go on the offensive.

At this point, the characters drive the story back against everything arrayed against them. Thus shifting through the povs is more dynamic, and really kicks up the pacing of the last half of the novel.

Did I lose my train of thought?

Well… damn.

I meant to probably say all of that in half the number of words. I kind of rambled there. But I guess I also wanted to give you a better (or at least longer) blog this week.

Wish me luck. As stated at the beginning by the time this goes live on the site I should be home from the hospital, but also probably less than clear headed.

Thank you for reading this far and surviving my ramble.