Sunday, November 30, 2008

Nano finish

Despite a higher than average intrusion of real life I managed to finish my novel for Nanowrimo this year. It was a close thing though. I found myself ten thousand words (one fifth of the target!) behind come yesterday morning. I started by spending some time planning that last ten thousand words and then got stuck in. I wrote six and a half of them yesterday, leaving me with a smaller target to hit today. I kind of went for it because I knew I would be out for this afternoon at my parents to see Debbie and family. And it paid off.

But is it any good? Well, probably not. It's quite a different story to ones I've been writing recently. It's not science fiction, but more of a straight, literary novel set in China in the early 20th Century. A time and place that I still find fascinating, and probably stranger than anything I could dream up for SF, it gave me a historical structure that always meant I could find some inspiration. The main pattern of the story came to me pretty much fully formed and I've mostly stuck to it. Despite deviations here, and the odd surprise, it's pretty much the story I had in my head and, looking back now I think that yes, it is good. Not in a letting anyone else read it kind of way, just yet. At the moment it's more like a pre-viz, or storyboard, for a movie. All the pieces are there, sketched out, but the actual film is yet to be shot. That's the next stage. Move it from the flat, cartoony writing that describes what I want it to be into the thing that it actually is. I'm looking forward to it. But for now it's time to read that Hellboy comic I treated myself to yesterday.

Thursday, November 27, 2008

(b)ankers

From Doonesbury -

"Marshall Plan, Louisiana Purchase, Race to the Moon, S&L Crisis, Korean War, The New Deal, Invasion of Iraq, Vietnam War, NASA."
-- list of government expenditures which, combined, are still less than the current bailout


We could probably end poverty and go to Mars if we closed all the banks. Hmmm...

Sunday, November 02, 2008

Nanowrimo begins

The nice thing about starting on the weekend is that you have plenty of time to do all those things you really have to do before settling down to write a novel. Things like installing a new, untested operating system on the laptop you need to use to write on, catching up on Facebook and emails, trying out the new features of your new operating system and playing with your colour scheme. Downloading some new desktop backgrounds for your PC. Reading about the Royal Australian Navy because it's the Wikipedia article of the day. Still, it has been a successful weekend and I'm even a little ahead. Back to work tomorrow but hopefully I can just keep plugging away at it in the evenings and get to next weekend with a reasonable word count. My mistake last year, when I failed to get much past the second week, was having days where I simply did not write. While that was not entirely my fault once you get behind it is a big challenge to catch up again.