Hmm, I don't think this is gonna happen
Okay, I'm still at 25,000 words with one day to go in NaNoWriMo. So I don't think so. Especially since I haven't yet finished my Econ 1A reading and homework due on Wednesday (which means I'll probably have to skip the last write-in tomorrow). Forgetting the iBook's power adapter pretty much sealed it, and the family's after-T-Day trip to Vegas didn't exactly help (especially since it was by car -- more details on the trip some other time, as it was quite eventful). I got a few hundred words written, but that's it.
So I'm not going to try to hit 50K. Instead, I'm going to refocus my energies on finishing the research, plot outlines, character bios, and world-creation that I had to cut short to start writing. In case you don't know my premise, it's a retelling of the Bible where God and Satan are aliens who come to Earth and create mankind as a sort of genetic experiment, and then conflict ensues, of course. Kind of a cross between Roger Zelazny's Lord of Light and James Morrow's Only Begotten Daughter. So, of course, this entailed a lot more research than I was able to do in half-a-month.
Of course, this includes reading the Bible. I currently consider myself an agnostic, but I was raised Catholic, so I have a working familiarity with the main stories. But as you might know, the Catholic Church discourages reading of the actual Bible from cover to cover, probably because of the oddities that you'll find in it (e.g. Moses talking God out of exterminating the Jews, God being unable to drive out enemies from Judah because they had iron chariots). So I planned to read the Bible in its entirety, but only finished through Exodus by the end of October and am still now only through 1 Samuel (and only by skipping books like Leviticus). And I only recently discovered The Skeptic's Annotated Bible. I don't want the book to be a Christian bash-fest (which was one thing I disliked about the otherwise hilarious movie Saved!), so I want to research the other side of it as well in sites like Answers in Genesis and anything else I can find. While I used to consider myself an atheist, I think I've become more open-minded in spiritual matters in the past few years, so this may become a pretty enlightening journey in and of itself.
In addition, I do want to get the setting and culture right. My wife was an anthropology major, and suggested the Human Relations Area Files, which includes an eHRAF online cultural database. Access to the database is not free, but they do offer a free 2-month trial for individuals, which I applied for. I have one month left and have hardly had time to do more than skim some of the materials (and they have a wealth of stuff to wade through). So poring through that will be my top priority. I'd also like to consult other works and theories, like Milton's Paradise Lost and maybe Erich von Daniken's Chariots of the Gods, which discusses the "God as alien" theory.
I only had a sketchy plot outline at the beginning of NaNoWriMo, and in the process of writing, I now I have it fleshed out a lot more, but there are still some gaping holes. I'm using a lot of flashbacks, so the order in which certain revelations and secrets are divulged is pretty important. Originally I was writing scenes in novel order, but now I think I should probably write them in chronological order to help maintain consistency of setting and character, and then rearrange them during the rewrite. This will involve a good deal of work, but I think that's going to be inevitable either way.
The character bios also started out threadbare and now I have a few lines of background for each character. And two of the three main characters are now fleshed out fairly well, albeit one of them evolved to the point where some of the earlier-written chapters are completely obsolete and need to be scrapped. And I have hardly anything in terms of the alien world-creation and technology or the layout of their spaceship. So I expect the battle scenes that I muddled through were pretty much a complete waste. Ugh.
While I think there's value to solving some of these problems on-the-fly, I think in my case this will result in creating myself much, much more editing and rewriting work than necessary. So instead of trying to crank out 25,000 words of slush that I'll just have to scrap, I'll just consider what I have as a jump-start in my creative brainstorming. Hopefully I can still use most of what I've written, but I'm prepared to scrap it. For now, I'll regroup to consolidate my ideas and build a proper framework from which I can build this thing right.
And without the crazy time-constraint, I can also continue to tend to my blog (and hopefully recapture some of the momentum I squandered because of NaNo). Speaking of which, I think writing for the blog had already given me good writing habits. I'm already a goal-oriented person anyway, so I think I'll do just fine without an external artificial deadline (although my boss may beg to differ). The main thing that had kept me from writing fiction was my wife's observation that I'm a better at writing non-fiction essays. And ever since I learned about opportunity cost in my Econ class, I've been a bit obsessed about maximizing my use of time. It was only after reading some article about how non-fiction writers can improve their writing by trying out fiction (and vice versa) that I decided to give fiction a shot again (my blog has some background on how I started writing). This is also why I'm trying out writing more freely on this LJ.
So hopefully I'm not a writer that needs NaNo, but we'll see. If I'm still at it by November of next year, I'll use it again as a kick in the arse.
So I'm not going to try to hit 50K. Instead, I'm going to refocus my energies on finishing the research, plot outlines, character bios, and world-creation that I had to cut short to start writing. In case you don't know my premise, it's a retelling of the Bible where God and Satan are aliens who come to Earth and create mankind as a sort of genetic experiment, and then conflict ensues, of course. Kind of a cross between Roger Zelazny's Lord of Light and James Morrow's Only Begotten Daughter. So, of course, this entailed a lot more research than I was able to do in half-a-month.
Of course, this includes reading the Bible. I currently consider myself an agnostic, but I was raised Catholic, so I have a working familiarity with the main stories. But as you might know, the Catholic Church discourages reading of the actual Bible from cover to cover, probably because of the oddities that you'll find in it (e.g. Moses talking God out of exterminating the Jews, God being unable to drive out enemies from Judah because they had iron chariots). So I planned to read the Bible in its entirety, but only finished through Exodus by the end of October and am still now only through 1 Samuel (and only by skipping books like Leviticus). And I only recently discovered The Skeptic's Annotated Bible. I don't want the book to be a Christian bash-fest (which was one thing I disliked about the otherwise hilarious movie Saved!), so I want to research the other side of it as well in sites like Answers in Genesis and anything else I can find. While I used to consider myself an atheist, I think I've become more open-minded in spiritual matters in the past few years, so this may become a pretty enlightening journey in and of itself.
In addition, I do want to get the setting and culture right. My wife was an anthropology major, and suggested the Human Relations Area Files, which includes an eHRAF online cultural database. Access to the database is not free, but they do offer a free 2-month trial for individuals, which I applied for. I have one month left and have hardly had time to do more than skim some of the materials (and they have a wealth of stuff to wade through). So poring through that will be my top priority. I'd also like to consult other works and theories, like Milton's Paradise Lost and maybe Erich von Daniken's Chariots of the Gods, which discusses the "God as alien" theory.
I only had a sketchy plot outline at the beginning of NaNoWriMo, and in the process of writing, I now I have it fleshed out a lot more, but there are still some gaping holes. I'm using a lot of flashbacks, so the order in which certain revelations and secrets are divulged is pretty important. Originally I was writing scenes in novel order, but now I think I should probably write them in chronological order to help maintain consistency of setting and character, and then rearrange them during the rewrite. This will involve a good deal of work, but I think that's going to be inevitable either way.
The character bios also started out threadbare and now I have a few lines of background for each character. And two of the three main characters are now fleshed out fairly well, albeit one of them evolved to the point where some of the earlier-written chapters are completely obsolete and need to be scrapped. And I have hardly anything in terms of the alien world-creation and technology or the layout of their spaceship. So I expect the battle scenes that I muddled through were pretty much a complete waste. Ugh.
While I think there's value to solving some of these problems on-the-fly, I think in my case this will result in creating myself much, much more editing and rewriting work than necessary. So instead of trying to crank out 25,000 words of slush that I'll just have to scrap, I'll just consider what I have as a jump-start in my creative brainstorming. Hopefully I can still use most of what I've written, but I'm prepared to scrap it. For now, I'll regroup to consolidate my ideas and build a proper framework from which I can build this thing right.
And without the crazy time-constraint, I can also continue to tend to my blog (and hopefully recapture some of the momentum I squandered because of NaNo). Speaking of which, I think writing for the blog had already given me good writing habits. I'm already a goal-oriented person anyway, so I think I'll do just fine without an external artificial deadline (although my boss may beg to differ). The main thing that had kept me from writing fiction was my wife's observation that I'm a better at writing non-fiction essays. And ever since I learned about opportunity cost in my Econ class, I've been a bit obsessed about maximizing my use of time. It was only after reading some article about how non-fiction writers can improve their writing by trying out fiction (and vice versa) that I decided to give fiction a shot again (my blog has some background on how I started writing). This is also why I'm trying out writing more freely on this LJ.
So hopefully I'm not a writer that needs NaNo, but we'll see. If I'm still at it by November of next year, I'll use it again as a kick in the arse.