8000+ words behind and broody...

Yep, broody. Brooding and moody. :)

So I thought I could catch up by taking two days off and writing like a madman. Um. Not quite.

The good news is that I actually developed considerably more of my world by stomping around at home and having time to let my brain work in a circular fashion around the whole picture. I even *gasp* drew a map and named some territories. I also downloaded everything I could possibly get my hands on to help me write a story.

Zulupad is a sort of simplified hypertext offline wiki and seems to be good for me to dump random worldbuilding thoughts into. I even got my hands on this thing called Writer's Cafe / Storylines which is kinda cool, like a notecard system for scenes on the computer (since I hate messing around with bits of paper and writing anyhow.)

All that is very well and good except...I have no scenes.

The three bitches that are my lame excuse for main characters are waffling around with their motivations and changing lanes so fast I'm starting to consider the wild idea that my Nanowrimo novel should be the first draft for an IF.

Since I appear to be considering multiple branching storylines anyhow. :(

Because of this crippling sense of multiple possibilities, I can't narrow it down to one possibility. And so all possible scenes evaporate on me instead. And my use for the Storylines program flutters off into the distance because I don't have a chronological plot.

Hell, I don't have any plot.

It decided to go drown itself in the toilet instead.

This brings back the crippling Inner Editor, who grabs my wrists, saying, how can you write when you don't even know what you want to write? Or where you are going?

There's a part of me that agrees with the Editor, that says, writing 50,000 words of crap and drivel is exactly that, crap and drivel.

Look, if I add the words that I've been freewriting about my novel, I would probably be 30,000 words and steaming ahead by now. But it's like lying because I know they aren't actually quite part of the story story.

Yet meanwhile while I'm concerned about what is actually story quality, there are these other mutts who are writing rainbow fluff and twinkies about weirdo things with even more horrible grammar and breaking the fourth wall and doing all kinds of strangeass things with their "novel" and having fun and of course, getting to 50,000 really easily.

The Nanoisms thread was a bit of a revelation for me. Suddenly I realized a number of them were essentially freewriting a "novel" (with author commentary thrown in). Kinda like 90% of the awful crap you see on fanfiction.net and hem, certain porn sites.

Well, duh. I can freewrite 50,000 words of stream of consciousness really easily.

And with better grammar and spelling to boot.

I think I can anyway. If my Inner Editor doesn't make me commit suicide first after a reread.

I don't think that's the point of what I want to do with Nanowrimo.

I have this blog for that. Or my freewriting diary files. These are not stories though. They're not narratives. There's no beginning, middle, end. I'm not trying to make them readable. There's no revision needed. I'm not even claiming them to be any useful commentary to anyone but me. These are words meant to help me work stuff out.

For Nano, I kinda want to aim for a somewhat better quality story. Like many of the Xena stories you see on lunacyreviews.com. Even though you still have 50% fluffy fanfic, about 50% of them are really pretty good writing, which is an incredible online ratio when you think about it.

Some people do it for fun, sure. Maybe they're people who don't normally write at all. So writing about fruit and hamsters and my little ponies are okay for them. And so is throwing in real plot ninjas wielding frigid razor-toothed can lid shurikens when they get stuck.

But er, I don't really think I want -that- kind of drivel in my novel. I kinda want a narrative that makes sense, even if it's unreadable drivel like some vaguely-EarthRrealms-based stories hiding in my hard drive. The sleuth story and Knights of Dawnhill solve a murder mystery come to mind rather quickly.

Granted, I like the Sleuth story. I think it's readable, if a little melodramatic in parts, and it makes a twisted kind of fanfic sense.

The Knights of Dawnhill one is really sorta awful in a language sense. A terrible amount of exposition, the absolute lamest plot devices on the planet (a bear claw? Astral hanging out the window in bat shape?) and totally irredeemable in terms of revision potential. But hey, the plot /connected/ (even if it looked like I sewed it together like a Frankenstein's monster) and the parts with Astral were funny, even if the other characters sucked major balls.

But but...they're...complete stories. In and of themselves. With no random fairies dropping into their self-contained universe.

I hate random fairies. So I can't really do "dares" that ask me to throw in a pirate or a ninja or things like that. My setting, unfortunately, does not have room for pirates or ninjas.

(Why the heck I didn't do a sea-elven Five Kingdoms setting where I -could- throw in a logical pirate is beyond me. Sorry, no ninjas. Faux Asian/Azian flavors are in my Magna Carta II list - Things I HATE in stories. Maybe if I wrote a CoX based story I could throw in a ninja without sending alarm bells ringing in my head.)

The good news is that Nanowrimo is being -incredible- motivation for me. I haven't touched CoX in ages. I played a bit over the weekend, but it wasn't very interesting, so I stopped.

I kinda want to do this again in December by myself, maybe a simpler thing just solo RPing, or with another setting and plot. (I watched B5 and got a story idea about telepaths and slavery, I read the Wraith Shadow Player's Guide and got all churned up about World of Darkness story potential.) With a much smaller word count, thank ye.

But I also don't want to quit on -this- Nanowrimo story now. Except...I don't even know where the story has gone. :P

I think...and I'm grappling here, that I have this fear of actually solidifying something. It's so much nicer to leave it as potential. Because you can have multiple branching storylines as potential, but when you write it out, you're narrowing the possibilities.

And for some reason, this scares me.

Which is weird when you think about it, since we all have a gazillion stories we should be writing about.

Very weird. Maybe I should really stop beating around the bush and go and write the freaking ending of the novel. A draft zero version that is subject to change, but at least something that I can see the end of.

Maybe I should just write some scenes AROUND my possibilities and stop worrying about how they all link up. I can fit them together at leisure in the following months, right?

Because Nanowrimo to ME is about actually getting words down on the page, in some semblance of 'readability' and getting practice writing story scenes and having fun doing it.

Now if only I could convince the perfectionistic part of myself of that whole-heartedly. Grrr.