Ramblings of a Samurai and his Duct Tape

I made it! WooHoo for Nano! no, not the sims way

I'm amazed I made it to the NaNoWriMo goal of 50,000 words!





It was a crazy month. Work was quite hellish, writer's block consumed my whole second week, weather has been frigid, (16 degrees right now, though I ain't going outside to test the veracity of this) and I've been pretty sick the last few days. But I got my 50k words, including 20k these last 5 days! (3 of which I've been feeling like absolute hell.





My novel has a long ways to go, but I got off to a good start with it. Most importantly, I learned a bunch of things. I participated in the Nanoprep group, and through that I had a good idea and had the framework of my story world fleshed out. But when I got to writing, I found I didn't do enough. I had created a few of the locations, and the ones my characters got to within the 50K words were relatively easy to move them through on their journey. But locations that I didn't really think through and create, were quite a bit harder to picture the action. The fight scene that took up my last 3k words for example. I almost had one of my antagonists throw his mug into a fire in the fireplace. But then I remembered, this town is hot. Theres a river of lava flowing nearby, there's no need for a fireplace in any building, or at least not in a waiting room of the Chieftain's tower! And that table that my Protagonist crashed through kind of surprised me too.





And then there's the fact that I had been expecting Mara to be a soldier who was married to Durk after my hero went forward in time. Turns out Mara is married to Durk, but it's Durk's sister Tavia that's the soldier, and she never quite got over a crush she had for my hero because of how he defeated a dragon. The only way I can fix that is to rewrite a certain 14k section to include Mara in, so that both of the women become soldiers.





For now at least, I'm going to shelve my novel. I'll get back to the actual writing of it at some point, but I'm just going to take a little more of a casual approach to getting it done. The note cards are going to stay on my wall, and I'm going to try and make an effort to stare at it a little every day, to fill in the holes which I now realize were like canyons rather than the pavement cracks I thought them to be.





Someday I'll complete this project. But for now I'll enjoy what success I've had. Watch a movie and turn off my brain for a bit. And Nyquil sounds like a good idea after that.