Closing in on the end (of NaNoWriMo)

I knocked down another chapter today, for 2547 words. I might have gone for more, but I wanted to give my hands a chance to rest. I suspect that the aches of Saturday, and feeling fatigued earlier in the week, were less exhaustion from writing than they were my fighting off a low-grade flu. Had I not awoken a bit dizzy this morning I probably wouldn’t have realized what was going on, and clearly the virus wasn’t that bad, since I was able to go out on my birthday. The fatigue I just put down to Thanksgiving cooking and prep.

Running around at soccer burned the last of it out of me.

As I noted previously, the novel will not be finished by the end of November. I should still be able to knock off two more chapters tomorrow, bringing me up to 100,000 words for the month of November. Probably another 25,000 will finish the book.

In the comments on yesterday’s post, Cjad asked if I ever wrote down notes to keep all the plotlines and material clear. The answer is an emphatic yes! I jot notes all the time: in my notebook for the novel, on Post It notes that go into the notebook, on separate sheets of paper that will go into the notebook somehow or get lost forever, and on my iPod Touch. It’s those moments, I find, when I’m not concentrating on the writing where little problems get resolved in my subconscious and an idea pops into my head. I especially like it when a villain or character finds a way to twist things around to make the story even more nasty than I thought it was going to be. Then the question I have to deal with (and I have one of these in the book right now) is how quickly or how long do I want to take in paying things off?

One of the other hard bits is when you’ve designated a character for a certain path, and start to wonder if you really want to go there. This is especially true when the character is slated for a rough time, but you like the character and really don’t want to have to destroy his life. This is a tough decision to make, but I have a rule I live by. If the only good reason for not ruining a character’s life is that I like her too much, that’s not a sufficient reason not to do it. And the fact that readers probably would wish the character would be saved that trouble isn’t, either.

Our job as authors is to provide entertainment, but part of that entertainment is something of an emotional roller-coaster ride. Bad things happen to good people. Some good folks go off the deep end in response to pressures. We see it in every day life, and to ground fantastic stories in a sense of reality, it has to happen in them, too. Readers may tell you they hate it on one level, but my sense is (being as how I’m a reader, too) that soulless stories where characters never really face a challenge or negative emotions just aren’t as entertaining as stories where things don’t always go as you might hope.

November Word Count: Hard: 95002 Soft: 18662