Mission Accomplished

Well, I did get a complete novel, even if the last few paragraphs jerk you to an abrupt stop. As President Bush once proclaimed, my mission is accomplished. Of course, he took a lot of heat for that statement. But he was correct; the invasion was over, and in that sense that mission was accomplished.

Now, I face the aftermath of my month long invasion into novel territory. I must take the "mess" I made, and put it into a more palatable form. That's editing, I suppose.

But I will probably take most of December to rest and enjoy Christmas holiday. If anything goes on with the book, I will post here. But if not... see you next year!

Winning, but not finishing

On November 27th, I uploaded my text thus far, and I was over 50,000 words. I was declared a winner, and I got to download my "trophies":

So, that's cool. Just one problem. I'm not finished.

When I reached 40,000 words, I recognized that the rest of the story would not fit in 10,000 more words. When I officially reached winner status, I started to go into outline mode and fill out the rest of the novel. I wrote snippets of prose and dialog from "future" pages in the book. These snippets were not descriptions of what would happen; they were like little glimpses into the future. Here is an example:

Jim and Zach walked up the closed gates of Humbert's mansion. Zach wore the huge 10 gallon hat that had once belonged to an abomination named Sheriff Shorty.

The gate swung open. The pair walked toward the imposing doors of the mansion.

Roman Jacobs scanned Sara for a briefcase, or a folder, or anything that might hold a document. "Miss, what do you have for me?"
Sara reached inside her purse and pulled out the snub nose revolver. "This, your honor. Now please sit down."

Ed looked around, the judge's smoldering glance following him. "Did you replace your mirror, your honor? I'm sure you did. Now, where is it?"

The spaces are where I fill in the surrounding story. Reading over it reminded me of something. It was like the beginning of part 2 of a 2 part TV show, where they recap what happened last week in little slivers of video. Except I'm going over what will happen.

When this was done, I had about 5 pages of broken story. I expect to end up with quite a bit more when it's finished (hopefully by the 30th, so I can feel like a real winner), and possibly a lot more on the second draft.

40K+

Almost there! The only problem now is that I have plenty of story left, and not much November. Oh, what a problem, you say in mock pity. Well, it's strange. When I started this, I expected the problem to be 5000 words and not one word more. But now I find myself confronting the task of "hurrying up" and wrapping everything together. The first 40K words are a stroll. The last 10K will be a sprint.

It is important to actually finish, not just get 50,000 words on paper. If I don't finish by December 1st, I may never finish.

I think I can do it. It will require wrapping up plots and subplots with a thud, but what the hell. It has to be done.

It was a dark and stormy night...

...and that threw me off track. For the past 14 days, I had been averaging 2000 words per day. But last night a line of dangerous storms moved through much of the mid-west and mid-south. At one point, our local TV station indicated a tornado might be forming, with a path leading right toward our house! At this point, our power went out.

Scary. Fortunately, our immediate area received no damage. If I had not been watching TV or listening to the radio, I would not have known anything was going on but a thunder storm.

Anyway, I could have written on my wife's laptop, or my Tandy Model 100 (my gadget at write-ins). But I was shaken up. I did manage to write a little with pen and paper by lantern light. Very moody!

Publishing, the Open Source Model

The month is going well enough. So far, 2000 words per day seems like a pace I can do. The trick is, don't look back.

I have a Google news alert to bring mentions of NaNoWriMo to my inbox. Today I got a press release regarding one participant who is writing an "open source" novel. The text is published as it is written. At the end of November, the manuscript will be edited (and thus improved, is the idea) not by just the author, but others as well. J. Wynia also has a helpful blog regarding self publishing.

Write-in? Go right in...

Our little group here in Bowling Green had our first write-in tonight. Our ML, poetsworld, had scheduled these for us. He had a good job opportunity pop up, though, so we were without him tonight. He will not be back for at least 3 weeks, so I am filling in as ML, for what that's worth. We did have another area participant join in though, so that still made 4 of us.

We wrote for 2 hours, and it was very productive. We had a little conversation, but I did get about 1700 words written at the little table in Starbucks/B&N. TechWidow (my wife) discovered it's a better place to write than home.

What's in a (dog's) name?

Ok... I'm not doing too bad. The prose sucks, but that's expected, right? My writing is not good even when I have time to think about it...

Regarding the last posting, I called the dog "Jerky." Terrible name. If I knew anyone that actually named their dog Jerky, I would kidnap their dog and rename it. But that name was previously "Fuzzy" in the text. Why "Fuzzy?" Because about 2 sentences into a 50K word novel, I had to name a dog, and couldn't. I could have well called the dog "The Refrigerator" Perry, because I just had to get something down and go on. Heck, that's 3 words compared to one, and 10 mentions (so far - don't look for this dog to be a major player, though), an extra 20 words if things get desperate!

Anyway, the dog's name is now "Sam," which some web site tells me is Hebrew for "listener." I would guess "Samuel" actually, since I don't recall many "Sams" in the Bible.

And They're, no, They Are Off!

I just wrapped up my first official NaNoWriMo day, finishing the day's work with 2,526 words. Not bad for a beginner, eh? I posted an excerpt, and grimaced when I read it. Here is an example of what I'm talking about:

Jerky shot bolt upright, as dogs will do, and shot a sharp report of a bark into the dark cloudy night.

Here, "Jerky" is the dog's name. Notice that I use "shot a sharp report" right after "shot bolt upright." With shooting like that, you might want to keep real guns out of my hands!

But, I'm not going to fret. I resisted the temptation to go back and tweak it. That may lead to wholesale editing, and that would be disastrous. Besides, that's what NaNoEdMo is for!