Novel

Well, the National Novel Writing month wasn't a complete bust for me, but I didn't hit 50,000 words.  Close to half that, sadly.

Things I learned:

Major video game manufacturers release new stuff in November.  Skyrim was no help at all.

It is really a novella.  Comes from reading short stories of pulp detective novel for a couple months before November.  The kernel of a story idea that jumped into a 1 page 20 bullet outline practically fully formed and started me on this madness by serendipity was really short form fiction. 

It's not about finishing in 30 days.  It's about writing with abandon with no internal editor and no deletions.  Save that for rewrite.  It's about getting a big chunk down.  So you finish 50k in February or something, in my, and others', case.  November gave you the impetus.  Markos lamented on Twitter the other day about the author that opens a scifi novel on a faraway planet with a harvest festival chapter among the colonists and then spends 67 pages describing the menu of the feast.  The problem isn't really the writing of those 67 pages, it's the publishing of the 67 pages when it should have been pared down to 167 words, in rewrite, methinks.

Big breaks in writing makes you lose the narrative a little bit.  Write every day.  Just like blogging.  Even half an hour.  I need to work on this.  Easier without video games.  August through October nothing was distracting me, why couldn't this month have been then?

Shoulda introduced the zombies sooner.

The flow is better than I expected, but a little off.  The first chapter flew off my fingers and somehow was chockablock with sexual tension.  Wasn't expecting THAT.

Planned pair of chapters can combine into one, sadly.  Turning 20 chapters into 10.  More of that short form 'disease'.

Keep plugging, it’s amazing what you think up while doing so.

Getting it all down in a stream is a good way to remember past details and not step all over them.  Pausing and thinking out the problems of motivations and fleshing out details is good too, but they can slow you down and hurt the stream.  Hard to find the middle road here for the pace of the rough draft.

Prewar and postwar detective pulp stories have a distinctive style and flair and differentiates.  Mine is set prewar, but I am amalgamating or muddling with postwar.

At Chapter 10 already.  But I feel there is another place this novel might take me for 10 more I hadn’t even considered yet.  Holy crap I can see how these things can get a mind of their own.

I picture this, what I have, as a Rough Rough draft.  It won't be ready to share until it is a Polished Rough draft, where I try to hit the typos, misspellings, tense shifts and what not.  Then I'd wait a bit and come back to it later.  Then a First Rewrite where you fill in the holes in the story.  Then Second Rewrite where you cut unmercifully and align the pacing.  Eventually a Final will come out.