TaRotWriMo

[Tarot]

This is seriously addictive. I'm finding myself spending most of my spare time on the novel! Last night I finally broke past the psychological 10,000 word mark, with the first 5 chapters done. For now I'm hovering about one day ahead of schedule, which is nice but not enough for my tastes. It was really hard at first, for several reasons - namely, this is my first real novel, and I didn't even write most races races and locations involved. Colombina did a fantastic job developing the Benshira and Eypharians, though, and I'm just filling a few gaps here and there with basic common sense.

So. Chapter 1, the first half of which is posted as my novel excerpt on NaNo, sucked. I can't spend too long on why it sucks, or I'll be tempted to rewrite it - suffice to say there's no heart in it. It wants to do too many things, and fails at all of them. I really needed to get the ball rolling, though.

Chapter 2 also sucks, though less so in my opinion. The chapter introduces several characters I made up on the spot. One, Kharfa, is a scheming but not too bright cousin to Pressor Kyrus and we learn he's made a strange deal with Alahean court mage Pycon. We also meet his three henchmen (well, 2 henchmen and a henchwoman). I liked the henchwoman's character and decided she's going to play a somewhat major role in the sequel, as well. The exposition could be better-paced, though.

Chapter 3, I thought was going to suck too. The writing is far from perfect, but something happens at the end that makes my main character more human. Let's just say he has a nervous breakdown when someone decides to be his very own Julius Caesar's ghost.

Chapter 4 may be the first solid chapter I've written. It also made me happy because my female lead Muriel wasn't a complete mystery anymore. The chapter is entirely about her and while I've taken inspiration from Goss in making her weave rugs (but hey, that's normal for a tent-dweller), I think she turned out fine. A devout Yahalite, but conflicted beneath the surface.

Chapter 5 I put in last night, and man, did it surprise me. The chapter's main purpose was to provide exposition without making it read like exposition. So, I ended up weaving it into a conversation between Aquiras and Priskil and the two lovebirds came to life in a way I couldn't have imagined. Priskil especially surprised me: her pre-Valterrian self was sort of a tease, a tad silly and borderline shallow in her refusal to acknowledge the outside world. She takes pride in the fact she's never given out a single Gnosis. Door-god Aquiras has a bad feeling about what's about to happen - and we get foreshadowing of Pycon's brand of insanity. "A genius is a nutcase with a plan." Now I need to make Sahgal meet up with A and P - it'll make Sagallius' final assault on Aquiras much more striking if they had known each other for a long time.

Chapter 6. I'm thinking the spotlight returns on Sahgal, who's about to see something quite unexpected...

I'm putting here links to the NaNo word count widgets so you can see pictures and graphs of my account's stats. This page contains an automatic progress report for my account. Feel free to quote and paste the widget's code to your own post. Just replace my user number (508168) with yours if you'd like to see how you're doing. You can find someone's number in the URL when you're looking at someone's profile/novel info/etc. As you can see, I'm keeping track of Goss vs. me.

[Tarot]

November 8th

18,192 words and chapter 9 is done. I have a realistic chance at breaking 20k by the end of today which would put me 3-4 days ahead. NaNo is so empowering! I'm quite excited, and I'm not one to get worked up over just anything. Writing is getting progressively easier, either due to practice or simply knowing my characters better than before.

The truly scary thing about NaNo is what happens when you just throw your plans out the window and go on autopilot. It's just as people say: you will write some crap for sure, but there'll be some beautiful gems waiting for you to put on your gloves (or, for the bold, go barehanded) and pick them up. My descriptions are so bad - half my characters are not even described much past their hair and skin color - but I think I've got their voices down. Some characters just forced themselves into the story: I introduced them as nameless parts of the scenery and they didn't like that. One was born two hours before I wrote the chapter and now is not only a crucial character, but one with some interesting secrets.

The most important thing story-wise is that I'd planned for Sahgal to be lonely throughout most of the story, but now there's a small party forming around him. This works much better as I can highlight his personality as well as the others' with dialogue. Sometimes the plans you nurture and cherish for weeks are just plain wrong, and NaNo forces you to reconsider them because they just don't flow with a story you'd enjoy reading. Then it forces you to find an alternative, and do it fast. Awesome.

Kill count: 2 (nameless quaternary characters)

[Tarot]

November 11th

I risked falling behind yesterday, mostly due to technical stuff. I updated my OS to Snow Leopard, and for some reason the net just stopped working. It was a very strange and low-level Unix bug, and of course you can't really google it without net (my plan makes that suicidal on my cell phone). Thankfully I had backed up the whole hard disk just before that, so I could simply format the disk and rollback to the old version, though it took quite a bit. That's why I wasn't around yesterday. It's really the first time OS X ever gives me trouble in many years of using it, so I'll forgive Apple this time around - it was also the first time I Time Machine'd everything, and I'm glad I did. Back up your disks!

Long story short, I was nervous and got very little writing time last night. The plot has also been slapping me around lately: apparently, 2nd week makes more victims than any other because your starting drive is lessened and the skeletons in your closet come around to haunt you. Mine came in the form of plotholes. Basically, I have several sides and they're all double-crossing each other. So far I've always postponed deciding what everyone's real goal is, but I can't avoid it any longer. This is why I kinda winged chapter 11 and I'm not happy with it, unlike the badassery that's chapter 10.

I had to resort to a solution that feels slightly gimmicky for everything to make some sense. Not as bad as when you're reading a detective story and find out the aliens did it, but not satisfactory, either. I needed it because one of my characters made mistakes that a scheming Eypharian noble wouldn't have. I had to have another character point that out, and then said character was quickly offed because it's part of The Plan. I'll have to go back to chapter 2 and change parts of it so they give proper hints and foreshadowing, though, but I think my novel is safe now. 22k and counting.

[Tarot]

November 13th

Finally passed the halfway mark. No matter how long the road ahead, it's less than what I've traveled so far!

Not much to report, but a word of sagely advice from the Italian NaNo forums: the fastest fantasy name generator is an Ikea catalog opened on a random page!

Procrastination-wise, I've also been spending far too much time on Vicipaedia, (Wikipedia in Latin). It's immensely nerdy, but it's really nice to see people write articles in Latin, and it's also nice to understand about 70% of it after so many years.

[Tarot]

November 18th - 32845 words

I've been slower lately, though it's not entirely my fault. I've been swamped with things to do, and frankly this feels like someone squeezing me like a sponge as they know I'm about to take flight and not look back. I've been given more or less daily "homework" that's taken most of my time. Bleh.

On the bright side, I'm back to writing my daily quota. I wish I could do more, but 1,700 words is the most I can do in an evening. I'm pretty sure I could do twice as much if it was in Italian (which is a wordy language too) but not in English. Not having any whole days to push my word count really hurts. I'm still ahead, though... just not as much as before. I should be hitting two thirds tomorrow.

I am thoroughly amused by Jen's NaNo diary and her referring to the struggles of an anonymous NaNo Miza participant. There's this joke about two people who are stranded on a desert island and one says: "I'm not naming any names, but someone just stole my wallet."

Anyway, I've gotten past my blocks. Muriel has had her badass moment, redeeming her damsel-in-distress role from the start till now. She's the one actually saving Sahgal this time around, only she doesn't know it because he's so sneaky.

The highlight of chapter 16 is - at last - Rupert Pycon being introduced. I'm not sure anyone will want to play a Pycon after they read about their creator. Well, of course he's the villain, and he's nuts. Like, totally nuts, and much more than I had anticipated before I started. He's some kind of emotional wreck who can go from laughter to tears over a split second. And he's so smart he almost looks dumb. He can control himself while at court, but when he's on vacation (like now) his personality is unleashed. The best thing is that he's untouchable. He's the national hero. He saved the country. Even Kovinus, who hates him, has to keep him around. He's the kind of psychopath who can sway the minds of millions.

He's still a freak.

[Tarot]

November 23rd - 46330 words

I'm getting close. I'm getting very close. Less than 4k words to go and I'm in the middle of the final, epic (though only in my mind) round of fisticuffs. Mind you, a lot of this is crap. The last third of the novel basically takes place in one large and barely described underground hall with characters going in and out as the plot dictates. Then there is the "corridor" leading to the "exit" and characters meet up there as the plot dictates. The second half feels more like a play in some ways. Of course, the entire book is a morality play turned upside down.

I don't know how I'll feel about this book a month or two from now, or if I'll ever put it for public viewing on the site (though I will certainly share it with anyone brave enough to ask for it). I think I got the character archetypes more or less right (they are exaggerated, but it was kinda intentional), though they need much more work done on them, but the setting is just abysmal. I feel the story is salvageable when character-driven, but the setting-driven parts are hideous. There is too much dialogue, not enough narration. Then there's the technical English side, which makes me cringe at the amount of repetitions and stale words/verbs used, but naturally that's the easiest part to fix.

So I can't help but smile at Jen's NaNo diary entry about the need for 50k words in the publishing world (you rock, Jen! Just lend me some of your wordy descriptions and I'll let you borrow some of my dialogue!) In my mind that's like buying a bigger shelf just in case I somehow won the Nobel prize. I do want to get published some day. I really do. And that, if it ever happens, will most likely be in Italian (though I had no idea Conrad didn't speak fluent English until his twenties!). And I suspect it won't be a Mizahar novel either.

We should do Script Frenzy together too! I'm kind of hoping for my tendency to show characters through dialogue to give me a tiny advantage in writing screenplay/script.

Time to get some sleep. Tomorrow I'm going to sign up for the final defense/discussion of my thesis next year. My thesis is going out to the refeeres in the next few days, which has freed up a chunk of time for me to make faster progress on NaNo.

[Ethan Renault]

Dang, I had no idea that November was National Novel Writing Month.

I've been trying to write a novel for a long time, but I've never really gotten anywhere on it. This could have encouraged me to put a little more work into it, but too late now i guess.

Either way, nice work with what you're doing! Hope it's a good one.

[Ghede Muut]

Tarot, are you writing a Novel based on Mizahar but outside of the forums? That's really interesting. I didn't know about NaNo, but one of the reasons I was looking for a PbP in the first place is that I enjoy writing, and I figured doing it collectively would be a way to boost my skills, since you get all kinds of interesting inputs and get to read very different amateur writing styles (which, in my opinion, have immense value, because they are raw - no theoretical background imposing rules and standards that could potentially kill creativity unless you are a master writer).

I believe I'm a very character-driven writer/reader: I enjoy plot advancements based entirely on characters, and I think that a deep, complex character can sometimes compensate for a poorer story.

I do not enjoy very descriptive styles, because I like imagining the settings myself. Often I even prefer to leave character's physical appearance open to personal imagination than to go into a lot of detail myself. It frequently happens to me that when a particular character's description comes later than its first appearance, I get disappointed, because I had already made him up very clearly in my mind and I have to adapt to his "new" look.

I hope I find the courage to start posting on Mizahar's universe sooner rather than later. I have the feeling that it can be a very positive experience.

But first I need a really compelling character

[Jilitse]

I don't know how I'll feel about this book a month or two from now, or if I'll ever put it for public viewing on the site (though I will certainly share it with anyone brave enough to ask for it).

GP. The other day you caved in and agreed to show you last year's NaNo to us, remember? Where is it now? I know I'm being annoying (and because I want to know Saghal's past for my own PC-selfish reasons ), but as a loyal admirer of your talented work (that's enough adjectives!) please do show it to us, soon!

Love,
Jil