nanowrimo 2008: days 11-17
god i hate the 20k mark. it’s this horrible “sweet” spot where you’ve invested enough of yourself that you’ve neglected almost everything else and you start to feel bad about. the story doesn’t exactly start to stagnate, but for me, the flaws become more apparent and that allows the critic of self doubt in my head say things like “you’re wasting all this time you should be doing other things for a piece of crap? you should be embarrassed. stop writing.”
the muse usually takes a vacation, too. everything that was supposed to line up perfectly sort of doesn’t. critical things need to happen and no matter how much i try, i can’t shove the right people in the right direction. it’s frustrating, and without the structure and challenge of nanowrimo, this is where i’d usually cop out and do something else.
and then i took a vacation. literally. this compounds the “waste of time” feeling, and having limited windows a day (or no windows, or windows i “make” instead of doing things i should otherwise be doing, etc etc) means that being able to just turn on the word factory and dumping is extra critical. turns out the muse got on the wrong plane. what should have been easy (it’s one of the first scenes i really “saw” in my head) was very hard. i’d drawn the characters a bit differently than i’d expected and i decided that it was taking too long to get to the heart of the story (the vampire bites), so i stepped it up and threw lots of my original scene out the window.
which was awesome. except rethinking the pace of the entire novel meant that i couldn’t just drop 300 – 400 words randomly and keep going. plus, without having really understood the motivations of one of my main characters, i couldn’t push through a couple of problems. it’s one thing to have a character sitting in my brain saying “i would never do that,” it’s another when he’s just not there. it makes the rest of them say, “why are we bothering, again?” and everyone goes home.
AAAAND (the excuses are nearing an end, i promise) all those motivational emails and such that i loved when i was ahead or on target suddenly became de-motivators. nothing like “you’re almost to 30k!” when you’ve just squeezed out 200 words and are still sitting at 19k to put a downer on you. i tried very hard to combat this with some internal “you’ve got two more weekends, 5 more good days where you can easily drop 4-5k. you’ll be fine if you take the time” mantra. it didn’t really work. the “why are you bothering” voice was louder.
so to sum up: missing muse, 20k doubts, vacation, broken plot, mean voices in my head.
as a result, i just crossed over the 25k line last night and am roughly 3k behind at the start of day 18. it’s not a lot and it’s certainly do able. i’ve hit the major exposition part of the piece (where Things are finally Explained) which is good, because i like explaining, but challenging because i also don’t want all my characters to sound like i wrote lectures for them to speak. my strategy is going to basically be to write down the lectures as i “hear” them and when/if editing happens later, jazz it up by wrapping another 4-5000 words around it that i can take my time with. i could skip it, but if it changes in the process of writing it down, then the rest of the story will need to be completely restructured. plus, i spent lots of time figuring out how the science and mysticism and history of all of this worked. i need to take advantage of that to get the words back on track.
seriously, that was 600 words in about 20 minutes while watching TV and i didn’t even tell you about the dream where i got attacked by hippos. 3k is nothing ;)
for today’s reading i give you my answer to “how do you describe ’she turned into a vampire’ without saying that (or ‘fangs’)?”
The woman’s smile stretched impossibly wide and she bared her teeth. She raised one gloved hand and pointed it at Violet’s throat. Violet stared as she watched the woman’s fingernails strain against and poke through the pink satin. Impossible, but still happening. The other hand, hovering at her side, went through the same claw-like transformation. The woman growled and raised her face towards the ceiling. Her grotesque sneer softened slightly as two pointed teeth emerged from her gumline, replacing her incisors with teeth more than twice as long and dangerously sharp. She leveled her head once more to look at Violet and her eyes had turned from orange to deep red.
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