NaNoWriMo Day 22

I hit 50,714 words at the end of today's writing, and it was at the end of a monster vomit of writing. Or vomit of monster writing, given the genre. I have 8 days left to keep chugging past the 50,000-word minimum, and I'll then edit it to a clean draft before wondering why I bothered.

I wanted to know if I could produce such a volume of text, and I did. And it almost kinda tells a story of slight worth to one or two people. You know, for a sequel to a horror movie from 27 years ago, that is. Total schlock. Gore, smut, goo, all the fun stuff. I can write that all day. Literally, it seems.

New Shirt Design

I'm friends with the folks at PostAtomic Horror, the weekly Star Trek review podcast. I even sat in with them for a few Next Generation episodes. They just recently moved onto Deep Space Nine, and they're loving how quickly the characters are rubbing each other the wrong way. The Roddenberry Mandate blocked internal conflict in the franchise, but after his death, DSP was based on interlaced conflicts, particularly between Quark the businessman and Odo the cop. Longtime contributor Scott Ziolko had a running gag on Twitter about their relationship, and I made a shirt out of it.This is my second PAH shirt design.

You can order your shirt here, if you so desire.

NaNoWriMo Day 18

I passed 40,000 words yesterday, and I'm probably two-thirds of the way through the story. I think I need to alter the setting of the second half of the book from a small office building to a very tall one to make the big horrible chaos even bigger and more horrible and potentially more chaotic. I know I'll be tweaking and editing and changing after all the words are set down, and hopefully changing the building layout will be the biggest alteration.

It's clear this will go on longer than 50,000 words, which is the goal of the exercise -- could I hit that mark and stick with the effort for a month? Looks like that's a yes. Question is how much do I mold this story after the end of the month.

Making comics has helped me approach this with thumbnails and storyboards. The last section of the book will be a horrific climax in an office building, and that will require some choreography to move between floors and determine who dies and how (hint: very very badly).

NaNoWriMo Day Eight

I just hit 23,000 words this afternoon. I'm halfway through the minimum word count of 50,000 with less than a third of the month gone. That's pretty good.

Now some of that is a cheat. Because it's a sequel to a horror movie, I'm recapping the events of the movies. This gives me a chance to patch some plotholes, and the film I picked has very large plotholes. The recent commentary track of the movie features the cast and director pointing out story weaknesses, and I wanted to clean those up in this project. I also wanted to of course build on the movie's story and follow the progress of one of the movie's leads. That's where the story idea came from: Ok, that's pretty horrible, but what happened the next day. The movie came out 27 years ago. What happened since then? That's how I got here, 23,000 words into a novel. I'm actually writing an f'ing novel. Golly.

You can follow me or make me a buddy at the November project website. I'm listed as heygregory.

NaNoWriMo Day One

After weeks of casual research and drafts of notes, I started my novel experiment today. To get 50,000 words in 30 days, I figured I'd need to hit roughly 1,700 words a day. That's what I had in mind as I wrote. When I was done with my first pass at the first chapter, I had right under 3,000.

It took some doing to get started, and that was after I found the right "camera angle" for the first scene. The first few paragraphs were slow to form, and I moved some sentences around. My initial first sentence moved to the third paragraph, and that felt liberating. it gave me a style direction to follow. I probably overdid the style, but it created sentence fragments, and I realized at the conclusion of the first pass that I could flesh those out and probably add 15% more words to my daily count.

That's a good start, I think.