I decided to try blogging about my experience with NaNoWriMo this month. I should preface this by saying I'm not going into November with the intention of writing a full novel; I've just been so busy prepping the release of Wondrous lately that I haven't had any time to write, so I'm using the event as an excuse to motivate myself into getting some writing done. Hopefully I can get 50k words into a new story, but who knows how far I'll actually come, haha.
I've been kicking around three different novel ideas for a few months now, so it was hard narrowing it down and choosing just one to focus on. I have a horror idea tentatively titled Drainpipe, a contemporary dramedy with the working title Mascot (until I can think of something better), and a fantasy that I'm just referring to as Town until I come up with a title for that one. Ultimately, I decided I wanted to work on Town, since that's what I had the most planning already done for. I had characters, a setting, a lot of details for the world, fantasy races, etc. Drainpipe isn't much more than just a general premise right now, and Mascot has characters and an entire outline, but right now I'm feeling more into fantasy.
Day One (11/1). I started off with a prologue that had not been in my mind at all during any iteration of this story, but when I sat down to write, the idea came to me and I decided to give it a shot. It's kind of unlike anything else I've written (kind of a romance), so it was pretty difficult, but I wrote almost 2,500 words of it so I'm pretty pleased. It's kind of disconnected from the rest of the story (though at the same time connected in a big way too), so I don't really need to worry about it before continuing with the bulk of the book, but I would like to come back to it and flesh things out to better get across what I was going for.
Day Two (11/2). I somehow ended up writing over 4,000 words in the morning, which is double what I'd planned to write that entire day. And the words aren't even very bad! I'm sure I'll feel differently a couple months down the line, but for now I think it's pretty good. It's about half of chapter one. I'm writing this book in a different style than I'm used to, and I like how it's turning out so far.
Day Three (11/3). A lot of this day's writing was just adapting/editing the sole chapter I'd already written for the previous version of this story, but I also wrote a lot of new content to go in between/after what I already had. So combining old/new stuff, about 5,000 words were added, and I wrapped up chapter one!
Day Four (11/4). I was pretty busy, and once I finished the work I had to do, I wasn't feeling very motivated to write, but I still opened up my Word document and cranked out about 1,300 words. Not a bad start to chapter two, and overall not a bad start to NaNoWriMo. I'm not sure how busy I'll be in the coming weeks, but even if I don't hit the 50k goal, I'm still glad I got anything at all written for this project. But here's hoping!
WORD COUNT: 12,950.
Media I've Enjoyed This Week Instead of Writing Like I Should've Been:
My good friends in Waterparks just released their debut full-length album "Double Dare" today, so I've been jammin' that a lot. It's a really great album filled with catchy songs that you should check out if you like some fun in your music. My favorite tracks are "Take Her to the Moon," "Dizzy," and "It Follows."
I also watched I Am the Pretty Thing That Lives in the House and Doctor Strange, the former of which I really did not get much out of, and the latter of which was alright but also Stephen Strange is kind of an insufferable person. Definitely a lower tier Marvel movie for me, which is disappointing after how much I loved Captain America: Civil War earlier this year. At least next up is Guardians of the Galaxy 2!
And finally, as far as television goes, I've been watching Channel Zero: Candle Cove, which is a new horror anthology series on SyFy. Season one stars Paul Schneider and is based on the creepypasta "Candle Cove." The first four episodes have been very intriguing, creepy, and tense, so I recommend it if American Horror Story has left a bad taste in your mouth. This week was also the finale of Atlanta, which had a fantastic first season and now I can't wait for season two. Hopefully we don't have to wait too long, though Donald Glover is off being busy in Marvel and Star Wars movies now..