Did I mention trying for a while? This is my 3rd Nano attempt and it's built on the premise that in the 1st and 2nd, I couldn't focus on one project (a problem I'm notorious for), and in the 2nd, my personal life also blew up with serious illness and a death in the family.
I've written novels before, but not 50K+ in any reasonable amount of time (and first novels being what they are, the one I finished in something like 3 years shall never, ever, EVER see the light of day) and not because I didn't have ideas that sprawled that large but because that lost interest/inspiration that comes when I can't wrap the story on paper shortly after I wrap it in my head.
This time, I'm hitting most of the issues that bogged down previous attempts and working out strategies in advance, including dealing with my lack of a love relationshp (read, downright ambivalence) toward intellectual plot-wrangling. I do plots but usually as they emerge naturally. This works great for me in shorts and stops working in a dramatic way in novels, alas. Then there's that this novel is a collab that totally tangented on us because we figured out where we were going as we went there and we sprawl in different ways and got the worst ends of BOTH of our sprawls instead of just the best of both our skillsets. This is a focused, remix it like a fanfic, bat clean-up on my half.
In short, this is doable. I used to write chaptered fic well but lost the feel of it for a while because of all the shorts I was writing. I've spent the last two years trying to get that back.
Which is a long way of saying that Nano is all about novelling, and I want to be all about novelling, and so we're a match made not in heaven, but in boot camp. Third time's the charm, right?
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timeasmymeasure
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Date: 2014-10-22 02:47 am (UTC)Did I mention trying for a while? This is my 3rd Nano attempt and it's built on the premise that in the 1st and 2nd, I couldn't focus on one project (a problem I'm notorious for), and in the 2nd, my personal life also blew up with serious illness and a death in the family.
I've written novels before, but not 50K+ in any reasonable amount of time (and first novels being what they are, the one I finished in something like 3 years shall never, ever, EVER see the light of day) and not because I didn't have ideas that sprawled that large but because that lost interest/inspiration that comes when I can't wrap the story on paper shortly after I wrap it in my head.
This time, I'm hitting most of the issues that bogged down previous attempts and working out strategies in advance, including dealing with my lack of a love relationshp (read, downright ambivalence) toward intellectual plot-wrangling. I do plots but usually as they emerge naturally. This works great for me in shorts and stops working in a dramatic way in novels, alas. Then there's that this novel is a collab that totally tangented on us because we figured out where we were going as we went there and we sprawl in different ways and got the worst ends of BOTH of our sprawls instead of just the best of both our skillsets. This is a focused, remix it like a fanfic, bat clean-up on my half.
In short, this is doable. I used to write chaptered fic well but lost the feel of it for a while because of all the shorts I was writing. I've spent the last two years trying to get that back.
Which is a long way of saying that Nano is all about novelling, and I want to be all about novelling, and so we're a match made not in heaven, but in boot camp. Third time's the charm, right?