Friday, December 9, 2011

November & Novels Oh My

So! I haven't written here in a long time, but I have a good reason, honest. Actually, I've got several. Mostly, my reasons are all about how I couldn't put words down here because I was using them all up elsewhere. Namely, my thesis & my NaNoWriMo novel.

I wrote over fifty thousand words in November & on the first of December I deleted about seven thousand of them & proceeded to rewrite them from scratch. I'm currently bumped back up, wordcount-wise (the whole thing will be somewhere between sixty & seventy thousand words), & coming in on the last section of the story, which is quite intense & a pretty exciting situation to be in - seeing this story I started just over a month ago come full circle, teasing out conclusions, letting my characters get as dramatic as they want to be because it's almost the end & endings are always dramatic.

The story is called The Accident Season & it's a young adult contemporary book imbued with enough magic realism to sink an airship & it has absolutely nothing to do with vampires, werewolves or any kind of remotely supernatural teen (okay, maybe there's a mention of ghosts & a tiny smidgeon of story-within-a-story fairies, but shush, that totally doesn't count) because I figure that as I spend every other waking moment thinking & reading & writing about vampires, it'd be nice to get a break every once in a while.

And it has been nice. It's been very nice. I'm happier with this than I have been with anything I've written for a long time (& I'm generally quite happy with what I write). Mostly, I've been having a lot of fun with it, which is sort of what writing's all about.

So although I'm sorry for neglecting this pretty little blog (seriously, look at that floral wallpaper, it's beautiful), I'm very glad I'm nearly finished the first draft of this pretty little book because I think it already has a lot of potential. I'll stop neglecting this place very soon. In fact I've kind of started now, haven't I? Because I have lots of things I want to write about, books I've read I'd like to review & Serious Academic Notes on Breaking Dawn that I'd like to share with those of you lucky enough not to be forced to sit through it because you're writing a thesis on teenage vampires. ("Why oh why???" is the lament of the moment, multiple exclamation marks & all.)

What about you guys, did you do NaNoWriMo this year? Any other year? (It's my third, I think, non-consecutive.) What did you write? How did you find it? What are you going to do with your stories now?

2 comments:

  1. It sounds like you've done tremendously well. It sounds like something I'd love to read (I read a lot of YA, especially contemporary fantasy, and always like magical realism).

    I started pretty well on Nanowrimo this year - my first time doing it, and in the first few days I was up to 8k and feeling like I could keep it up. Then I made a *huge* mistake. I treated myself to a Mac Air with the idea that I'd write on it. I lost several days to playing with it and installing new apps, and then I'd fallen far enough behind that I gave up on Nano for this year. So, next year: NO NEW GADGETS.

    But while it was working, it was /working/. I hadn't tried writing any amount of fiction in several years and I had never written more than a couple of thousand words of story. I didn't think I could. And then I realised that the ideas weren't coming not because I inherently wasn't able to write or imagine or come up with stories, but because I wasn't taking the time to sit and write and daydream. Sitting with a target the ideas came out of the words that I put down: good ideas out of bad words, better ideas out of good words, and it snowballed.

    I want to go and write now :)

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  2. I'm working on finishing my NaNovel, too! Mine's a teenagers-saving-the-world story with some fantastical elements and characters I'm totally i in love with. It's the first time I've really written (aside from academic papers) in years, and it feels so nice. I'm glad you've been having fun writing, too! <3

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