eddyfate

Here's the short version: I'm dropping out of NaNoWriMo to avoid burnout. Yes, after only five days. But I'm still writing.

The long version is that I'm only dropping out on a technicality, and here's why.

See, I've written one day on NaNoWriMo thus far. Sunday, I was physically exhausted from ICC -- no worries, it happens. Monday, I wrote a really solid 2,500 (and hated most everything I wrote, but that's part of the process, I think). Tuesday, I was out for several hours entertaining guests from Ireland, and got back late. Wednesday, I was mentally exhausted, so I gave myself a pass. Today, I was charged up for writing at work (which I've been doing pretty much every day this week), but I realized that I was dreading going back to my novel.

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At the end of this, nothing has really changed, except that I'm not holding myself to an artificial expectation. Instead, I'm holding myself to a completely different artificial expectation, one that makes more sense for me.

This weekend I finally took all of the brainstorming I've done for Night Fall and starting turning it into an outline.

I used a modified version of the Snowflake Method for plotting. Last week I started with a one-sentence "elevator pitch" for the book, and expanded that into a paragraph of five sentences, making sure that most of them ended with some sort of complication. Today I took that paragraph and expanded each sentence into its own paragraph, detailing the progression from start to finish in more detail. I then broke out each sentence of those paragraphs and numbered them. These were the building blocks for each chapter.

I then spent a couple of hours putting everything into yWriter. (For those of you familiar with yWriter, I have one "scene" per "chapter" -- I want lots of short chapters for this, so it makes the most sense structurally in the software.) I used the sentence I wrote for the chapter as the chapter's description. Each scene also asked for a goal, a conflict, and a resolution, which I filled out based on what I had in mind. This lead to some restructuring of my chapters, which I did on the fly as it made sense (and I fully expect I'll do again as the book comes along). yWriter also asks which characters are in which scenes, which forced me to start fleshing out which characters+ I'll need for the story.

I approached the novel as a straight-forward adventure story. Most of the comedy I like usually comes from entertaining writing and scenes, not from a zany plot, so I wrangled my plotting as if I were writing a legitimate vampire hunter story. Besides, by plotting "straight," I don't have to worry about whether the premise is funny (since it isn't), and I think I can find some organic humor from the plot tropes of the genre as well.

In the end, I have 29 chapters roughed out. Even if I assume about two thousand words for each chapter (which would make each chapter very short), that's 58,000 words, which is well over my NaNoWriMo goal. I think it's likely the book will end up being longer than that, though, so expect I'll be talking about this well into December. Part of what leads me into thinking this will go long is because I have 13 named characters at this point (although, to be fair, one is a pug dog).

If I have time later this week, I'll start fleshing out details on the characters to make them all unique and interesting (and funny, of course). In the meantime, I'm excited about working on this!

First off, I decided to write Night Fall, the parody novel of female vampire hunter "bad girl" protagonists, featuring Katrina Night. I even mocked up a fake book cover last week and posted it on Flickr, to help me visualize the book itself more clearly. I covered the various reasons why I didn't pick the other novel options a while back. I spent some of my post-surgery recovery time brainstorming and jotting down random ideas that have come to me, and man, I have tons of ideas for this. I'm actually having difficulty narrowing them all down, which is a good sign, I think.

One thing that came up over the past week or so, however, is the question "Why do NaNoWriMo at all?" Chuck Wendig actually did a good job playing devil's advocate over on his blog (which, if you are not reading, you should be), and I think it's good to spell out my specific reasons for doing this.

( Why I'm Doing This )</div>