*It* Has Begun....
Since I was a good girl and did my NaNo despite lots of real-life obstacles, then I have rewarded myself with a December free to write whatever I want. No projects...well, except for the holiday gifts, but that's a special exception. And writing anything includes writing nothing, which (aside from the holiday project) has pretty much been my December.
But today, I was sitting at my desk, the warrants were done, and I had a half-hour before Bobby picked me up for lunch, and I got to thinking about the AMC prequel, about the romance of Nerdanel and Feanor. Back in May, while waiting to meet my mother-in-law for dinner, I had jotted down a rough out-of-order outline in my paper journal but hadn't touched it since. My hope was to start the project in the new year.
But suddenly, I really wanted to work on it. So I dug out the journal, created a scary new folder on my flash drive called "Nerdanel and Feanor Novel," opened a new MS Word document, and started to put the outline in a more sensible order.
So it has officially begun.
It might just be that I will have three novels-in-progress going at once. Am I crazy? The Midhavens/NaNoWriMo novel is still unfinished, but I am probably at the most difficult part. I think that it is fairly obvious that I am not really good at writing plot-heavy stories. If too much happens, my stories start to unravel. It's like playing connect-the-dots: I write what is happening, but the characters and the mood--the strong points of my writing, I think--become almost non-existent. The chapter I am in is where the backstory and present story both have major life-changing events that also relate to each other (that makes no sense, I know, and I'm sorry), and it is very, very heavy on plot. I have known that the chapter sucked since I was writing it, and I think it's best to step back and give it some more thought. I have a feeling that I will be scrapping the whole thing and starting again, having (rather unsuccessfully) written a rehearsal. It is an important chapter, but it is also a chapter that must be handled delicately, given some of the subject matter. It's also a chapter that I want to have a strong impact, not to feel like a slightly flesh-out outline.
I have decided, then, to take a while off from this story. Once this chapter is finished, it should slide rather easily to the end.
At the same time, Bobby and I are in the beginning stages of our collaborative project: writing a novel-length version of The Tree of Hours, the short story that I wrote last Christmas for him. I've never cowritten before, but the first time might as well be with Bobby. (Also, besides me, he is most familiar with my fantsyverse.) We're just in the preparation and prewriting stages right now, but we're both excited about it and hope to be started by the new year.
The Nerdanel/Feanor story is now fully outlined, aligned with the AMC timeline, and I wrote the first two pages. Who knows how long that one will take; for me, stories about Feanor are either really fun or really difficult. Since this is a whole novel, half from his PoV, it will probably be a bit of both. He is a tough character to write.
It's funny because whenever I start a new novel, I actually get nervous. It's like I feel that if I mess up on those first few steps, the rest of the novel will be scrap. Maybe I'm still paranoid after having to hammer the first ten or so chapters of AMC into shape, both stylistically and mechanically. I never want to go through that again, so I make sure that I know what tense and PoV I want to use. (And I changed both on the N/F novel before one page was finished....) Doing ten revisions solely to tweak tenses is not fun at all.
But today, I was sitting at my desk, the warrants were done, and I had a half-hour before Bobby picked me up for lunch, and I got to thinking about the AMC prequel, about the romance of Nerdanel and Feanor. Back in May, while waiting to meet my mother-in-law for dinner, I had jotted down a rough out-of-order outline in my paper journal but hadn't touched it since. My hope was to start the project in the new year.
But suddenly, I really wanted to work on it. So I dug out the journal, created a scary new folder on my flash drive called "Nerdanel and Feanor Novel," opened a new MS Word document, and started to put the outline in a more sensible order.
So it has officially begun.
It might just be that I will have three novels-in-progress going at once. Am I crazy? The Midhavens/NaNoWriMo novel is still unfinished, but I am probably at the most difficult part. I think that it is fairly obvious that I am not really good at writing plot-heavy stories. If too much happens, my stories start to unravel. It's like playing connect-the-dots: I write what is happening, but the characters and the mood--the strong points of my writing, I think--become almost non-existent. The chapter I am in is where the backstory and present story both have major life-changing events that also relate to each other (that makes no sense, I know, and I'm sorry), and it is very, very heavy on plot. I have known that the chapter sucked since I was writing it, and I think it's best to step back and give it some more thought. I have a feeling that I will be scrapping the whole thing and starting again, having (rather unsuccessfully) written a rehearsal. It is an important chapter, but it is also a chapter that must be handled delicately, given some of the subject matter. It's also a chapter that I want to have a strong impact, not to feel like a slightly flesh-out outline.
I have decided, then, to take a while off from this story. Once this chapter is finished, it should slide rather easily to the end.
At the same time, Bobby and I are in the beginning stages of our collaborative project: writing a novel-length version of The Tree of Hours, the short story that I wrote last Christmas for him. I've never cowritten before, but the first time might as well be with Bobby. (Also, besides me, he is most familiar with my fantsyverse.) We're just in the preparation and prewriting stages right now, but we're both excited about it and hope to be started by the new year.
The Nerdanel/Feanor story is now fully outlined, aligned with the AMC timeline, and I wrote the first two pages. Who knows how long that one will take; for me, stories about Feanor are either really fun or really difficult. Since this is a whole novel, half from his PoV, it will probably be a bit of both. He is a tough character to write.
It's funny because whenever I start a new novel, I actually get nervous. It's like I feel that if I mess up on those first few steps, the rest of the novel will be scrap. Maybe I'm still paranoid after having to hammer the first ten or so chapters of AMC into shape, both stylistically and mechanically. I never want to go through that again, so I make sure that I know what tense and PoV I want to use. (And I changed both on the N/F novel before one page was finished....) Doing ten revisions solely to tweak tenses is not fun at all.