NaNoWriMo, A Month in Review

It's hard to believe that November's over. After a month's worth of scrambling to write or think of what I'm going to write next, I'm both exhausted and feeling strangely empty. Empty in that there's no deadline hanging over my head any longer. Guess what,

I love deadlines.

But,

Statistics

• 50,899 words
• 52 Chapters
• ~ 150 Pages in manuscript format

Overall Plot Structure

I originally planned to cover Nigel's life from age 9 to about 15 in the span of 50k words. I ended up covering from 9 to 10, or about the first 1/3 of what I was looking into. This leads me to Lesson learned #1:

• I am a wordy bastard. And as such, I expect to cover about 3 times what I actually cover. And that's not a bad thing. (Let it be known though, that My wife, who also did NaNoWriMo, Covers exactly as much as she expects to cover in the range of words she's working with, which is something that I find both awesome and amazing [We'll talk about that more in a bit.]).

So the story if you break it down covers the time from when Nigel leaves his decaying family behind and goes out into the world to make it on his own. Almost immediately, he meets up with smuggler and revolutionary, Robert McKee, who takes him under the ole' wing and teaches Nigel to read all the while filling the boy's head with ideological dreams of a better future.

Nigel then breaks McKee's friend Aleistar Tweedy from prison, a man reknowned for his ability to read any text. With Tweedy out, they steal an elven tome containing banned magic (The Diruleans don't do magic, or elves for those of you not up on your Ae'rinus lore). Their plan, cast some spells and wreck up the town. But,

Nigel gets captured by Leicaster Dunnovan, the noble (and apprentice Necromancer) that Nigel stole the book from in the first place. Nigel spends a good bit of time in the dark, being tortured, before eventually breaking free and killing Dunnovan.

In the process he finds out that there is a second book, which is in possession of Dunnovan's master, William Blakesley. Nigel goes after the book, spends ten days in a shipping crate crossing the Portsmouth bay, and rides back to Darkepoole with a bunch of Na'Claad gypsies led by Quick Jonny Quink.

Upon returning with the second book, things are starting to look good, until town guards attack the tavern where McKee lays out his plans. [details of the climax omitted] Nigel barely escapes with his life, and is forced to flee to Rae'lan.

Flavor of the text
If you've ever read my stuff, you know I'm annoyingly postmodern with orientation--footnotes, metafictive elements, plurality, blah blah blah. This book doesn't have much of that at all. Overall, what I thought of when approaching the writing was two things: Grit and language. So I channeled a lot of what I learned from Ann Pancake's glorious use of language together with a bunch of good dark grit ala the kind I get from reading Kilean Kennedy and all his recommendations, and came out with something that's full of clipped incomprehendible (possibly to some) dialog, and lots of teeth getting knocked out amid spraying blood and gore. I tried very hard to vocalize the differences in accents spoken by the characters in the story, and even varying accents from the same localized area based on age and experience and what not. According to Sue, I was successful. Once it's publishable (word on that below), we'll see how it flies in the wild.

Sound of the text
Music is a requirement when I write. And usually I get some sort of playlist going that builds the mood of whatever I'm working on. This project was a bit problematic with music in the beginning as nothing really seemed to drive the narrative inspiration for me, but once I got up around 20k words, I found myself constantly hopping onto YouTube to watch a quick video or two for inspiration. I ended up making a playlist of them, which is now up to 51 songs. Here's a feed:

Overall though, I think the most influential song was Handlebars by the Flobots (thanks Rod for turning me onto that song way back when in Grad School).

The Highlights
Perhaps one of the best things of NaNoWriMo wasn't the writing so much as the fact that my wife, Sue decided to join in the fun with her own NaNoing. She started out by hand, writing her Cersee stories, but then eventually switched online and managed to hit 30k by the end of the month, which considering that she spent a good chunk of the month rewriting what she wrote by hand, and the fact that she, unlike me, values sleep she did a super job. It was truly a great month for us to be sitting side by side creating things together. And since she isn't done, I'm looking forward to this month and future months of us working on finishing her story, and building new ones. I think this writing process might be a real great replacement for D&D, which with real little kids right now, is very hard to pull off.

I'm also very happy to have finally gotten back to my roots by writing fantasy. Back in college, I felt pushed to bury my love for genre fiction in favor of literary writing...which was probably a good thing, but now it feels awful nice to decend into fantasy again. The Nigel cycle is far from over, and in the coming weeks and months, I plan on building a transmedia experience out of it using a combination of background information-like blogs on my Ae'rinus blog, as well as even more in-depth stuff on the Ae'rinus wiki. As for the actual text, I plan on serializing it and releasing direct to teh Intarnets as soon as it's revised enough for release.

So that's more or less where It all stands. Here's to more stuff in the future!