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The NaNo fallout and other shenanigans.
Dec. 7th, 2010 08:41 pmHey gang!
So, I reached my chosen goal for NaNo--60k by the end of the month--but it's becoming clear that I won't finish "The Time Ghost" in as few words as I suspected. I'm going to need at least 100k all done. Possibly more. But no worries. I still have a plan, and it's still moving forward. Actually, this is fairly exciting for me, because I have a tendency to write short. Having a healthy-length manuscript, rather than a skeleton that hovers somewhere between "novel" and "novella" no matter how I try to beat it into one direction or the other, is evidence that I'm doing something right.
Now, here's what I really want to talk about: "Dusty." It's a vampire story, I don't know if I've talked about it much before, but it's been "on hold" for several months now. The reason for that is it started to scare me. I've always been fairly sensitive to the horror genre as a whole, movies, books, whatever, but when you're the one in the driver's seat, it's a little different. The strange thing about this one is that it's frightening in ways I didn't expect. Parts of it are gruesome, but that's not what I'm talking about. Fear is so subjective, which is why you can talk about the same piece of fiction to two different people and get two different reactions, about exactly what was scary about it and why, or whether it was scary at all. This story is taking me into parts of my mind I haven't thought about much, buried deep enough that I didn't even realize they were buried until this came up. It's much more personal than I imagined it being. I don't want to go into any detail here, but the upshot of all this is: I put it aside when I realized where it was going. And now I've decided it might be better to follow it through and just see what happens.
Wish me luck!
So, I reached my chosen goal for NaNo--60k by the end of the month--but it's becoming clear that I won't finish "The Time Ghost" in as few words as I suspected. I'm going to need at least 100k all done. Possibly more. But no worries. I still have a plan, and it's still moving forward. Actually, this is fairly exciting for me, because I have a tendency to write short. Having a healthy-length manuscript, rather than a skeleton that hovers somewhere between "novel" and "novella" no matter how I try to beat it into one direction or the other, is evidence that I'm doing something right.
Now, here's what I really want to talk about: "Dusty." It's a vampire story, I don't know if I've talked about it much before, but it's been "on hold" for several months now. The reason for that is it started to scare me. I've always been fairly sensitive to the horror genre as a whole, movies, books, whatever, but when you're the one in the driver's seat, it's a little different. The strange thing about this one is that it's frightening in ways I didn't expect. Parts of it are gruesome, but that's not what I'm talking about. Fear is so subjective, which is why you can talk about the same piece of fiction to two different people and get two different reactions, about exactly what was scary about it and why, or whether it was scary at all. This story is taking me into parts of my mind I haven't thought about much, buried deep enough that I didn't even realize they were buried until this came up. It's much more personal than I imagined it being. I don't want to go into any detail here, but the upshot of all this is: I put it aside when I realized where it was going. And now I've decided it might be better to follow it through and just see what happens.
Wish me luck!