Tag: NaNoWriMo 2018

1,671/16,735

So, learned something useful today.  I absolutely got stuck on the narrative today. I have a formerly evil knife, I have a college that will have a boffin to look at it, and I have… not yet decided who the boffin is, why the knife is so important, and why the reader should care. So I stalled. But!  I realized that the hero should have interviewed the parents of the victim, so I could get in my daily wordcount target on that.  And once that’s done, I can put it into the main text and maybe get a better idea.

(I also need to write an outline.)

Anyway! Lo! The sausage-making process!

2,089/15,065

Annnnnd we’re back on track.  I think that I’ll be hitting a point soon where I can use more from the original short story, which is starting to mutate anyway.  I’ve realized that the perfectly adequate villain in that short story is better suited as something else in the book, and am establishing things accordingly.  I’m very pleased, actually.  I didn’t want this to just be an inflated version of something I had already written.

887/12,975.

I almost declared today to be a not-happening day, to be honest.  I’m tired and I’m cranky and I’ve spent the last week running around on errands and I need it to be the weekend.  But I decided to work through all of that and finish Chapter 3.  Which is finished.  And 887 is better than I expected, honestly.  Plus, I was getting above quote in wordcount earlier, so this isn’t as bad as it could be.

1,681/12,088.

Tough day to write.  I think that I may not be keeping much of today’s: it establishes a recurring character, but he may not be quite right.  Ah, well, the important thing is to keep the plot moving.

1,729/10,407.

Had to power through today: didn’t sleep well last night and while theoretically I could have slept in, it turned out that I could not.  And I was only able to use a token paragraph or two, this time.  Still, we got a couple new characters introduced, including a mob boss.  Now I just have to figure out what help he’s going to be for our hero.  Because our hero does not need any more people telling him how important this Case is, thank you very much.  Our hero needs assets.

1722/8678

Another day where I could use about half of the existing story, but I can already see the motivations and the plot complications altering the original.  This is good, though.  Stuff that works in a short story doesn’t always work in a novel.  Besides, this is how you learn.

Also, this is where Frozen Dreams gets a little more complicated for me.  I need to start adding secondary characters, a subplot or two, and a good deal more action.  Why, there’s only been one fight scene so far!  And in a pulp detective story, too. Tsk, tsk…

What with revisions, by the way, this is only a close approximation.  I do go back and add a word here, change a phrase there.  But it doesn’t affect much.

Today: almost 1,900 words, and almost 7,000 total.  I’ve gotten to the end of Chapter 2.  And these were all original bits, too!  Got a complication and a minor character introduced, which is nice.

A little over quota! We are at 10% written (although 50,000 words is a little short for a novel these days, right?).  And I have an action bit coming up, which is going to be nice.  Can’t decide whether this should be before the chapter break, or afterward.  Not really sure how big the chapters should be, either.

I think that we hit a good point for the end of the first chapter, too: our hero has gone to the crime seen and just met the chief suspect.  It seems a natural stopping point.  1,639 words today, for a total of 3,316, and the recycling of previous bits from “Frozen Out In Cin City” will have to cease for a few days.  I have to add some more characters, flesh out the ones introduced so far, and all that other fun stuff.  I really should have done this as a novel from the start, but at least I know how the blessed thing ends, and how the hero got there.