Writing Blog Number 2

20241115 - NaNo-15

NaNoWriMo #15

Day 15.

Halfway through NaNoWriMo and I am on course to equal last year’s insane effort.

So, almost 5k words today. Good day concsidering it felt rather relaxed and chilled – half an hour writing here, half an hour there. Sometimes going in with no expectations and just writing when I felt like it and not forcing the issue can pay off.

Of course, so can not having a job, a social life, friends or anything akin to something else to do… but I digress.

Anyway, we’re still with the cryptids! They have set up at the dig site and are about to spend the night.

This is it – they are going to be attacked. So, how do I isolate them completely? Got the idea from an interview I did maybe 30 years ago when I was still a vaguely working journalist – I interviewed a small group who had been inside a building when it was struck by lightning. I had some good memories of what they told me – I’ve used bits subsequently in stories – but decided to go hunting online for any other eye-witness accounts. I found three, all on different sites, and all of them not only told very similar stories, but they matched that interview from long ago.

So, lightning struck the satellite dish on the roof, and burnt out everything plugged into the electrical system, which included all their phones and computers. It also made the electronic gates lock so they cannot leave. Now they are electronically isolated, and are just coping with that.

I stopped it there, with them trying to recover physically and mentally. Tomorrow, I will hit the first attacks at the new place. I have 7 characters there… the narrator will survive and so will his wife… but how many more will get out unscathed?

I get excited writing about the demise of characters. Unfortunately, I do feel that the characters I am going to kill off are not well developed (except the lazy guy), but I still hope their deaths will make the horror of the tale really be upped and hit the reader hard.

The story has cracked 30k words, but I can’t see it being stretched to reach 50k; this means it will be yet another novella. Then again, I could pair it with my other Australian cryptid story and sell them as a good 90k word book, 2 novelas, Australian monsters.

I’m getting ahead of myself. This story isn’t even finished yet!

4923 words today
Total words: 76338

So, if this is halfway, I am looking at 152676 words, about 1000 less than last year.