I might actually finish NaNoWriMo this year.
I feel rather as if I'm cheating on the spirit of NaNoWriMo by the particular approach I'm taking to it, but if it means I'll finish for the first time ever, I'll take it.
The approach I'm taking to it is to outline/write small scenes from/do character studies about characters from all the stories I've had bopping about in my head for more than a year, which is an awful lot of stories. It feels like cheating because in no way am I writing only one story - heck, I'm not even writing stories, the outlines aren't that detailed and the fully-fledged scenes are few and far between - and it's not like I haven't been mentally hashing out these stories for years and years and years, but it's writing, and it's more than I have been doing, and that makes it good. And when this month is over I'm going to have massive swathes of text that I can generate like twenty different Scrivener documents out of and maybe, just maybe, some of these stories will get written instead of just being repeatedly churned around inside my head.
Also, I apparently have really strong feelings about my Tatterhood retelling, because I skipped forward in my list of things to outline in order to work on it today and I have written close to 3500 words, which is ridiculous.
The list of stories to be outlined this month looks something like this:
- Rainbow Kingdoms, which has a really horrible name because I'm pretty sure I've been plotting bits of this out since I was 8 and this name has been attached to it the entire time. This story involves travel to alternate, high-magic universes, lots of magic users, and comatose dragons. Also, a ridiculous number of elf variations. Like, 8 major species of elves, plus way more hybrids than should be strictly possible, it's ridiculous.
- The necromancy and blood magic world, which is the original home of Nikolai Bone (for those who are familiar with her) and which has at least four stories attached:
-- Obet, an ancient, human-appearing creature who practices blood magic of a kind.
-- A girl in a vaguely Victorian time period in this world, who is being used by Obet to kill one of Obet's siblings, and who is also one of Nikolai's ancestors.
-- Nikolai, who eventually kills Obet.
-- Nicole, Nikolai's daughter, and the one in the story about vampires.
- A whole mess of stories in a vaguely Victorian, vaguely Steampunk, vaguely magical, primarily non-white setting, including:
-- Nima and her niece Lara and Lara's drama with wanting to get married and being jilted.
-- The story of Nima growing up.
-- Two kids on an airship (which is nothing at all like Scott Westerfeld's Leviathan series, I promise)
-- A girl who ends up tangling with an infamous thief while she's a teenager, and gets part of her soul(/the essence of who she is) sucked out by him.
-- A girl from a rural area who ends up going to a college-type institution of learning in a city, and apparently ends up in a stable poly relationship with a man and another woman, a thing which I totally didn't have either the knowledge or the context to realize back when I first started writing this story but which makes all kinds of sense now that I do.
- Kara, who lives in an ever-changing, un-ending, labyrinthine city, which is ruled over by an ever-changing Horned King, and within which mortal and immortal factions are constantly in conflict. (Also, after some reflection, this seems to be a Beauty and the Beast variation.)
- Romance novel 1, which started as fanfiction for a mobile game and quickly became something else.
- Romance novel 2, set in a world where about half the population has some fae ancestry of some sort.
- Fairy tale retelling 1, which involves bits of the Lorelei, Rapunzel, Hansel and Gretel, and the White Cat.
- Fairy tale retelling 2, which is Tatterhood, and also about her mother, who seems to actually be a troll. (Falls under the "All Trolls are Different" trope.)
- An ancient bit of thing with world-hopping, world-conquering green elves, and a golden elf who is part of the resistance against the world-hopping green elves, and the half-breed green elf who helps her out, and oh god this story is old and terrible but if I get around to it I'm going to outline it anyway because it speaks to my id in terrible terrible ways.
YUP. Terrible stories. So many terrible stories.
But at least I'm writing.
(And now that I've written them all out and counted, that'll only be 16 Scrivener documents, not 20. Unless one of them has plot-babies.)
The approach I'm taking to it is to outline/write small scenes from/do character studies about characters from all the stories I've had bopping about in my head for more than a year, which is an awful lot of stories. It feels like cheating because in no way am I writing only one story - heck, I'm not even writing stories, the outlines aren't that detailed and the fully-fledged scenes are few and far between - and it's not like I haven't been mentally hashing out these stories for years and years and years, but it's writing, and it's more than I have been doing, and that makes it good. And when this month is over I'm going to have massive swathes of text that I can generate like twenty different Scrivener documents out of and maybe, just maybe, some of these stories will get written instead of just being repeatedly churned around inside my head.
Also, I apparently have really strong feelings about my Tatterhood retelling, because I skipped forward in my list of things to outline in order to work on it today and I have written close to 3500 words, which is ridiculous.
The list of stories to be outlined this month looks something like this:
- Rainbow Kingdoms, which has a really horrible name because I'm pretty sure I've been plotting bits of this out since I was 8 and this name has been attached to it the entire time. This story involves travel to alternate, high-magic universes, lots of magic users, and comatose dragons. Also, a ridiculous number of elf variations. Like, 8 major species of elves, plus way more hybrids than should be strictly possible, it's ridiculous.
- The necromancy and blood magic world, which is the original home of Nikolai Bone (for those who are familiar with her) and which has at least four stories attached:
-- Obet, an ancient, human-appearing creature who practices blood magic of a kind.
-- A girl in a vaguely Victorian time period in this world, who is being used by Obet to kill one of Obet's siblings, and who is also one of Nikolai's ancestors.
-- Nikolai, who eventually kills Obet.
-- Nicole, Nikolai's daughter, and the one in the story about vampires.
- A whole mess of stories in a vaguely Victorian, vaguely Steampunk, vaguely magical, primarily non-white setting, including:
-- Nima and her niece Lara and Lara's drama with wanting to get married and being jilted.
-- The story of Nima growing up.
-- Two kids on an airship (which is nothing at all like Scott Westerfeld's Leviathan series, I promise)
-- A girl who ends up tangling with an infamous thief while she's a teenager, and gets part of her soul(/the essence of who she is) sucked out by him.
-- A girl from a rural area who ends up going to a college-type institution of learning in a city, and apparently ends up in a stable poly relationship with a man and another woman, a thing which I totally didn't have either the knowledge or the context to realize back when I first started writing this story but which makes all kinds of sense now that I do.
- Kara, who lives in an ever-changing, un-ending, labyrinthine city, which is ruled over by an ever-changing Horned King, and within which mortal and immortal factions are constantly in conflict. (Also, after some reflection, this seems to be a Beauty and the Beast variation.)
- Romance novel 1, which started as fanfiction for a mobile game and quickly became something else.
- Romance novel 2, set in a world where about half the population has some fae ancestry of some sort.
- Fairy tale retelling 1, which involves bits of the Lorelei, Rapunzel, Hansel and Gretel, and the White Cat.
- Fairy tale retelling 2, which is Tatterhood, and also about her mother, who seems to actually be a troll. (Falls under the "All Trolls are Different" trope.)
- An ancient bit of thing with world-hopping, world-conquering green elves, and a golden elf who is part of the resistance against the world-hopping green elves, and the half-breed green elf who helps her out, and oh god this story is old and terrible but if I get around to it I'm going to outline it anyway because it speaks to my id in terrible terrible ways.
YUP. Terrible stories. So many terrible stories.
But at least I'm writing.
(And now that I've written them all out and counted, that'll only be 16 Scrivener documents, not 20. Unless one of them has plot-babies.)