NANOWRIMO UPDATE

I mentioned a few days ago that I was restarting my nanowrimo because the original idea I had really wasn't working.

BEST. DECISION. OF MY LIFE.

I wrote more in the first 3 days of this new story than I had in the entire time I was writing the old story, and as of today I have surpassed 25k words and am now only 1715 words behind, which I can easily catch up on.

I'm also have far more fun with this story than I was with my old one. Mostly because this one is much lighter and the characters are far more diverse and less serious.

I'm procrastinating from drawing so here's a rundown of what my new story is about:

• Set in a post-apocalyptic, futuristic society in approximately the 24th Century (still working out the details). About a century and a half ago there was a nuclear war over a power source called 'the vore'. Since then, humanity has rebuild to a point where they are about technologically equal with what we are now, but large areas of the world have been reduced to a barren wasteland.
  
• There are groups of people known as 'otherworlders' (placeholder until I think of a less cliched name) who, in the wake of the war, accidentally absorbed the remaining vore energy in the world, granting them supernatural abilities. They have been exiled from society and are considered dangerous and hostile.
  
• The story revolves around a character who is a blank slate. She has very little basis for knowing who is good or evil, she is at a point in her life where both sides of the impending 'war' have arguments that sound appealing and morally correct, and she doesn't know what to believe any more.
  
• The story starts with the character going on a mission at the command of a mysterious otherworlder who has kidnapped her friend and is holding her for 'ransom', so to speak. She will only be released when the FMC kills a man living on the other side of the wasteland and steals a mysterious orb in his possession for her.
  
• The story will then, hopefully, devolve into something concerning the otherworlders/humans (I won't give too much away about what the whole conflict is about).
  
• The story itself is a mix of sci-fi and post-apoc genres, but I'm throwing in things like zombies just to keep the action flowing and amuse myself xD
  
• There are three main characters so far. Sloane, a mechanic and a party girl who has never taken anything seriously in her life. She is tough, tomboyish, not the brightest light in the house, and fairly morally ambiguous. Darian, a kleptomaniac fry cook who has fallen into things that are way over his head, and Hackner, a gruff mercenary with a grudge against the man Sloane has been asked to kill.
  
• I am using this story to indulge my love of neon hair colours. Yay for futuristic worldbuilding~

So far I'm quite happy with the dialogue and some of the descriptions I've got down. My main concern is the plot and pacing. I feel like I have far too many events and that I'm dragging them on too much for the sake of filling up more words. I'm 25k in and she's still doing the first mission she was sent on!

But I'm gonna keep trundling along, because as the motto for Nanowrimo states: editing is for after.

(going to Waiting For Godot tomorrow - I can't wait! :) )

I Can't Look At Deep Fryers The Same

Guild and I have just started watching a long-running British show called Spooks.

This endeavour started out as the grinding task of sitting through 7 seasons of a show we knew nothing about, in order to get up to the entry of one Richard Crispin Armitage, who comes in as a main character called Lucas North.

We were not overly impressed by episode 1, finding it confusing and difficult to keep track of all the characters, with a plot that did not particularly pull us in.

But then episode 2 happened.

Episode 2, where a character previously thought to be quite main was brutally murdered. And I mean, brutally murdered. It sprang out of nowhere, I didn't think they would go through with it, when BAM, they were dead, and Guild and I were left staring at each other in horror over the remains of our dinner.

Nothing has shocked me this much since Hershell's leg got chopped off in the series 3 premiere of The Walking Dead.

Upon reading about the reaction to this episode I learned that it was originally going to be the season finale, but got pulled forward, and the character death was for the express purpose of letting the viewership know that in Spooks, no one is safe.

And gosh darn did they get that across well.

They wanted me to sit up and pay attention? THEY HAVE MY RUDDY ATTENTION. I am hooked to this show now. No longer am I just sitting around waiting for RA's character to enter, I am genuinely invested.

Matthew Macfadyen's character (or baby Darcy, as I mentally see him - this show started 11 years ago) is also great. In fact, all of the characters are starting to become more developed (and I'm hoping the show goes a Stargate SG-1 route with their cast) and are all very well acted. But Macfadyen's Tom is currently my favourite because while he is quite stoic, he has a very subtle personality that he plays extremely well. He has also, in the course of a mere 4 episodes, sustained enough trauma to fill an entire h/c bingo.

In any case, I look forward to watching the rest of Spooks (and hearing Guild's thoughts on the show so far, once she gets around to actually posting something).

I think this might even make it up there with Endeavour and Breaking Bad. I'm honestly enjoying it that much. It's very well written, but there have been a few slow bits thus far - we'll see where the next 9 seasons take it.

(It is also complete, which means we can marathon it :3)

This Might Be A Very Bad Idea.....

I'm restarting my NaNoWriMo.

asd;golkasgndsa it's just going so terribly that I honestly think I have more chance of getting it complete if I start a new story, from scratch, 20k words behind than if I continue grinding away at something that I'm quite honestly not enjoying.

Characters tend to carry stories for me. And the characters of my previous idea seemed great in planning, but right now none of them are really coming to life, and it's frustrating.

(cue ranting about characters no one but me knows about yet *WEEPS FOREVER*)

Neo - Mr Existential Crisis, and I don't know why I didn't see this coming earlier because I had enough gosh-darn trouble writing Hamlet for my major work. Neo has 24601 issues and I'm not able to get them across subtly enough.

Sheva - Ridiculously hard to express her personality without revealing why she's so angry and revenge-fuelled, and that would mean letting out her whole backstory straight away.

Konnor + Cady - TOO SIMILAR TO EACH OTHER and don't have distinct enough character voices.

Damon and Morrigan are the only two characters I have a handle on - and guess what? Damon's not in the story yet (he's about 5-7k words away from entry and I'm already 3k words behind and unsure if I can bring myself to write up to him) and Morrigan made an appearance at the start, but is a good 15-20k words from returning. Ack.

In any case, CHARACTER VOICE IS KILLING ME because no one is distinct enough and I had this trouble with Sci Fi Oth already and managed to push through it, but it's just not happening here.

If anything the problem is that I planned too much. Seems counter-intuitive, I know, but in all my other stories the characters that have flowed most freely sprang from no planning at all. Damar wasn't even meant to be in his story. Taspir and Hush started with two very basic character ideas and grew as I wrote them. I genuinely made up Arkab as I went along and by the time hedied he had gone through a roller coaster of mood swings and I still felt like I had managed to keep him in his own, very distinctive character the whole time.

And Creed quite literally appeared out of nowhere and has become the only character who I can confidently write at a moment's notice (probably because almost anything can come out of Creed's mouth and not be OOC; dude has no limits).

In any case, I worked out that

• my original idea is not working; plot wasn't solid enough from the start and I thought characters would carry it but they didn't
• there isn't enough humour in my story because of the limits of the characters I'm using
• a lack of modern-day slang and profanity is making it hard for me to write filler like I normally do
• I'm not in a fantasy-genre mood right now, which really isn't helping
• subject matter is too serious + heavy for something like NaNo which requires a lot of blather
• I'm genuinely not happy with what I've written so far and it's putting me off writing more

I'm not having fun and for something like NaNo it's enough of a problem that I'm going to start again, from scratch, do a couple hours planning and give up some fanfiction-reading time over the next few days to catch up on those 20k words, and GET THIS THING WRITTEN

I'm going to draw off existing characters (Wyth, Creed, Damon, anyone) to put together a new cast quickly. I have had a couple of vague ideas swimming around in my head since playing Assassin's Creed III and catching up on The Walking Dead; combined with some old story ideas I had on the backburner, it should be enough to get a working plot together.

As far as how confident I am in my ability to catch up on 20 000 missed words?

I wrote over half my major work draft in one day (albeit after a week of angsting and procrastinating). When desperation calls I SHALL DELIVER or something like that

speaking of delivering

last night as I lay in bed contemplating, I came up with a monologue for Iago in the next installment of the Sci Fi Othello AU that I was really happy with. It was only a few sentences but I really, really liked the exact wording that I had worked out.

Being me, I did not write it down, and come today I cannot remember it.

I remember what it was about, and what he was getting at, but the exact wording I had is gone. And it is frustrating me beyond measure.

Hopefully it returns to me or I will not be amused :(

Anyway. Off to listen to music and plan out the basic skeleton of new story now. I'll reset the word counter on the side bar once I've made a new start.