I know I haven’t been as active as with other nanowrimo/camp nanowrimo events in the past. It’s been sort of…a tough last couple of weeks. I hate to use something like that as an excuse, but it really has been. But, there’s good news besides that!
Let’s talk about this week and give a little update on this current nanowrimo 😀
I’m actually very happy that I’ve restarted this website in this more “talky” way. I’m treating it more like a normal blog than some crazy “I’ll upload fiction everyday” challenge. I’ve realized that when I do challenges like that, they start to feel like a shore, and that really messes me up as a writer. And after a few “revelatory” moments in the last couple of weeks, I’ve really come to understand I need to remember how it feels to enjoy this side job of mine. And this week should show my progress towards that!
I’ve posted two new stories (technically older, but revised now), both of which you can check here: https://www.ravenapotheosis.com/archived/fiction/ . I really liked revising those two a few months ago, and I could talk a lot about them (probably too much). But, posting them up here again made me remember how much I liked writing that world. And just by reading them again before hitting “publish” on the editor, I got tons of crazy ideas. It was very energizing. Now, I have all these plans for once I finish my current novel project!
Speaking of which, I can say that I’ve finally reached the halfway mark, and it was all thanks to something someone online told me. In all honesty, it was such a small comment that I felt dumb that I hadn’t thought about it before. It’s one of those things that smack you in the face, and you just want to facepalm because it was literally in front of you.
You see, I had been having a lot of complications with this draft. I had come up with so many changes in the rewrite that some personality traits slowly changed for the main character. Well, to be more specific, things that pushed him to do something weren’t there anymore. That meant he was free to do some other things. And as a bad novice writer, I started trying to force the main character into obeying me by trying to make him explain why that was the only option he had.
To be more specific, let me give you a specific scene. In the novel, the main character finds himself at a crossroads. On one end, he has the villain gunning for him. On the other end, he has this one person responsible for his current situation. Originally, the story made it so he had to tag along with that person who put him in the bad situation. With the big changes though, I ended up removing that situation and that left me with the main character refusing to go with them. That meant, there was only one road for him, a third one. He had to go on his own and do his thing.
Since that went against the plot map I had prepared, I got frustrated up to a point where I wanted to just give up on this draft. I started to look back at the previous two, and contemplated just tossing everything in the trash.
Then my savior. A comment. “Why can’t he just go on his own?”
I stared at those words, and tried to come up with an answer. All were excuses. There was no good reason why he couldn’t besides my own issue of, “but the plot map!?”
As you can imagine, I ended up saying “screw the map,” and played it by ear. Of course, I wanted to steer the story towards the big plot points. Well, a chapter later and…he’s following the plot as he should, I’ve developed the villain more, and even had a chance to explore the world a little more. And now, I’m back on track and feeling better than ever. At this pace, I think I might even win nanowrimo within the next two or three days!
Sadly, that doesn’t mean that I’m done with the project. But! It does remove a certain level of stress from me. Erroneously from my part, I’ve allowed nanowrimo to become a stressor. I created this synthetic idea that I had to “write new stuff” for it. So, I was forcing myself not to copy and paste any other part of the novel into the document in order to remain “pure” to the nanowrimo word count requirement.
In the bright side, I should manage to get through the 50K with all new material. And after that, I should be able to copy around 40k worth of material from the previous draft just as expected. which means…I might have a solid second draft in about 2 weeks. Even saying that makes me tremble from excitement. Sure, I’ll still have to revise and edit some of the nuances, such as references to previous events and add a little more personality to the descriptions, but that’s all final touches stuff, things I can work on throughout most of may.
That means…I’m on schedule, surprisingly. I might be done with the full draft by June, which means spending the summer trying to sell it while starting work on a different project. I’ll finally be able to write a different story. I know right, I haven’t finished one, and I am itching to start a new one. I’m really bad with finishing things. I’m more of a “let’s start something” guy.
But anyway, that’s the nanowrimo update for the 24th. Six days left…..