It’s November… I’m sure you can guess what that means. LOL. I have of course signed up on the new-and-improved National Novel Writing Month website. And so far, I’m rather delighted to share that things have been going extremely well.
I wrote previously
that I’ve been working on a fanfiction story (for Gilmore Girls) since the end
of August. While I’ve been dedicatedly chipping away at the project, I didn’t
quite make my self-imposed deadline of finishing the story by October 31st.
I was tantalizingly close but when the clock rolled over to November 1, I still
needed a couple days to wrap things up and put ‘the end’ to the tale.
If you can believe it,
I did it! I managed to finish the whole kit-and-caboodle Sunday night (November
3) around 11pm. To add to the ‘can you believe it’ list, the final word count
for the whole story is a whopping 95,177 words – the final 13,000 of those
words written between November 1st and 3rd! This new
fanfic is in fact the longest one I’ve written… by more than 30k words.
Now that I’ve got the
GG story completed, I’m going to be turning my attention to one of my original
works. I actually struggled with the decision of which OW project I was going
to focus on for NaNoWriMo 2019. I spent a good three hours the other morning
evaluating the status of each project, as well as how I felt about my ability
to pick up and go with it.
I’ve got three major
OW projects at various stages. They are all very different kinds of projects. Of
course, they’re all romance but that’s where the key similarities end.
The first project I
considered is a stand-alone novel. It’s a second-chances, coming home, contemporary
romance. While I’m reasonably confident about the major plot points for this
story, this is the project that I lost a third of my already finished work for.
In the months since I discovered the damaged files, I’ve been unable to find
any way of recovering them. The last report I received, from a local IT guru,
was that those particular file storage locations were damaged and unrepairable.
I am still scouring all my computer hard drives looking for (even partial)
cache files, as well as any that may exist in my online storage servers. Lesson
learned in this case: backup, backup, backup, backup, backup. And then backup
again! In the end, I decided not to spend November focused on this
particular story. I will definitely be coming back to this project at a later
date though.
The second project I debated
focusing on for this year’s NaNo, is one that is very near and dear to my
heart. One of the key foundation points of this story was inspired from my own
life. This story is a paranormal romance novel featuring witches, the Tuatha de
Danann, and ancient gods and goddesses. It is a stand-alone novel but there is
a short story/novella length prequel I’ve also been working on that goes along
with it. The major stumbling point I discovered, and the reason why I didn’t
choose to work on this story this month, was that while the main conflict is entirely
clear to me and I do know how the story ends, there are a number of other
important plot points that I still haven’t quite clarified in my mind.
Finishing this story will require a hefty amount of plot planning that I just
don’t want to spend the time on right now.
Which brings me to my
third option – the largest, most complicated, most involved project I’ve got
going on. This one is also paranormal romance but it features were-creatures of
various forms, the fae, and vampires. This project is a trilogy story arc and
the three books have interweaving plot points and scenes that occur concurrently
but are told from different points of view in each of the three books.
In the past couple of years, I have spent a great deal of time on planning this story. I have detailed character profiles for the three men and three women that are the focus of the books, as well as for a few important supporting characters. I have extensive timelines already developed and major plot points outlined. This is a massive project though, one I know I have no chance in Hell of finishing before the end of the year, let alone by the end of November. Which, to tell the truth, was sort of what I was hoping to do. I spent most of October telling myself to choose anything but this project to work on.
However…
Yeah, I totally ignored
my own advice and picked the third project to focus on. In the end I realized
that whether or not I finished the project by the end of November or December,
like I’d hoped, wasn’t nearly as important as simply writing. My head isn’t currently
in the right place for either of the first two projects. I’ll get to them
eventually, just not right now.
Until next time –
happy writing!
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