Naril

RPGC #6: The NaNo One!

I'm at 43,400 words, which puts me an entire day ahead of schedule, thank goodness. I have definitely been finding some interesting challenges in writing a much more action-heavy narrative than the web-of-secrets, detective-procedural sort of story Part I was. Something particularly difficult to let go of has been the idea that everything has to make real-world sense, even though I very carefully and intentionally built my world in a way that allows for some serious rule-of-cool silliness without straying from narrative context. Part of that surprises me - I built this world, why do I have to keep reminding myself that a fifty-meter-wide monocycle armed to the teeth with electrical discharge cannons is totally okay? I blame my engineering classes.

Still, I'm through the first three big vehicle chase/combat/action scenes, with pacers to breathe for a moment before some new terrifying thing happens. I'm also getting quite a stable of entertainingly weird vehicles to go hurling through my world's insane faunasphere. My favourite is probably the one I just wrote - an enormous articulated snake with sections a couple of meters wide and a few meters long, a two-person cockpit for a head, and a massively electrified hull to deal with at least some of the forest monsters they'd be likely to encounter.

RPGC #6: The NaNo One!

Right now, I'm at 39,296 words, and I think I'm pausing here for now - I need to get dinner and play with my cats and snuggle my other half. :3

I finally had to sit down with a ruler, some math, some graph paper, and my incredibly rudimentary drawing skills and work out the scale for some of the things in my world. There are a lot of very, very big things, which I did intend - but there are enough of them that I'm starting to need to understand their relationship in a very concrete way. Our Heroines, for example, are piloting a flying machine (very nearly the only one of its kind) that's definitely human-scale - the "living area" is about the size of a city bus, or a nice RV. The Priory, on the other hand, has colossal, armoured flying citadels that, as it turns out, are terrifyingly huge. They were always intended to be dramatic, but I guess I surprised myself with how much. I think I kind of love it.

What are all our working titles? I'm terrible at them, so right now my story is just called The Wall. I'm really starting to warm up to it, though - there's something to be said for simplicity.

Priest & Hawthorne Investigations - An Urban Fantasy Adventure!

Hello everyone!

I have been absorbed by my NaNoWriMo project this month, but I will have a post up for everyone by tomorrow night. I hope you won't find it too self-indulgent, but I did promise you a little bit of what's going on with a lot of NPCs. You'll just also get to learn a little bit about Morgan, too. :3

RPGC #6: The NaNo One!

37,500 words! I'm hoping to get a little bit further ahead every day for the next few days, because I'm reasonably sure I'll need at least one day off - Chateau Naril is hosting quite a Thanksgiving celebration this year, and that means I need to be in my kitchen preeeeeetty much starting from Wednesday evening. *laughs*

My story originally started life (in my head and even in the early outlines) as a straightforward adventure. There's still a lot of that in there, but there's so much more now. Our Heroines have become reluctant players in a game of power and conspiracy, racing toward a goal that nobody in the game truly understands - only knowing that they all need to get there first.

Slightly modified from my NaNo author profile....

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The Ancients didn't kill the world - but they did drive it mad.

Thousands of years ago, civilization fell and left the world ferociously dangerous, with an out-of-control biosphere and humanity no longer at the top of the food chain. Over time, a new nation rose, tearing their own cities out of the endless jungles and forests and discovering the ruins, wonders, and terrors that their ancient ancestors left behind. Of those, none are more mysterious than the Wall - a vast, impenetrable energy field completely isolating the Northern part of the world's most-explored continent. But in a few days, the Wall is coming down, with word that a mysterious, powerful group known as the Priory are working to that end. When it falls, dozens of teams of explorers, scientists, thieves and miscreants are ready to charge into that unknown land, dreaming of a gold rush.

In the workshops of Kanda, the closest city to the Wall, Ada and Lara Velt are prepared to be one of those teams. Ada is a prolific inventor, her sister an academic. Like many, they are deeply distrustful of the Ancients' legacy, and want to know more about what might be locked behind the Wall. They suspect there's something dangerous up there, and while Lara expects something that perhaps should be locked away, Ada hopes for something that might help to undo the damage the Ancients did. What they find - and the path getting there - will be something other than either of them expect.

RPGC #6: The NaNo One!

Remember to back up your story!

I passed 35,500 words today, and that's with houseguests and a dinner party. I'm proud of myself. :3 Our Heroines have taken to the skies, putting them in an extraordinarily rare position - and one that has a liability for every advantage.

We're almost in the home stretch, everyone! There's considerably less ahead than there is behind. By now our stories are considerably longer than 100 pages long - on average, a 50,000-word story is around 200 pages of printed text. Kind of fun to think about, isn't it?

RPGC #6: The NaNo One!

And I'm finally at Part II! 33,793 words, and Our Heroines are about to embark on what I hope will be a high-speed, high-stakes, adrenaline-filled race. A vast new field of possibility has opened, but only Our Heroines and two other groups know what's really there - and none of them have the whole truth, only three different perspectives, conjectures, and outright myths.

I can't believe I started this story with the image of a fifty-meter monowheel shooting lightning at an airship while they both charged over prairieland towards a distant mountain range. I love everything that's grown out of it, and I'm so happy it took me almost 34,000 words just to get to the lightning-shooting.

What does Part III have in store? Keep listening to me babble and you'll find out!

RPGC #6: The NaNo One!

Your first draft is never a waste of time, and finishing your project is never a waste of time. Seeing how things fall together at the point where you say "This version is done" is absolutely invaluable for any second drafts, third drafts or rewrites. I really don't want to sound mean, but stopping your first draft because it's full of holes, or because you know you have to rewrite it or you spilled nine French 75s on it or whatever is a really good way to get stuck in a never-ending cycle of "first drafts" that are never complete enough to warrant further work.

If your goal was to get to 50,000 words, get to 50,000 words. Then your next goal can be "use these words to make something better next time." Beyond anything else, a creator's mantra is finish what you start.

Edit: Oh, and so we all get our dose of cheerful-Naril, 32,000 words! Part II starts tomorrow! :3 This story is probably going to be around 80-90k words for the first draft. Maybe I'll finish by the New Year! That would be fun.

RPGC #6: The NaNo One!

I got to 30.700-ish words yesterday! The proverbial chickens are coming home to roost, and Our Heroines are learning about the motivations for their other set of antagonists from an unexpected (to them) source. Then Part II, with the Mad-Max-Meets-Furious-7 chase sequence, can start. :3

So, everyone, what's the short summary of your story? Do you have a beginning, middle, and end planned (or can you see them), or are you letting things grow in a more free-form kind of way, to put those pieces together later? We're getting toward the home stretch - sometimes it's fun (and useful!) to take a step back and look at the shape of the whole story. :3

RPGC #6: The NaNo One!

I was busy being headbonked by an extraordinarily affectionate cat all night, but my word count is just shy of 29,000 words for today so I'm going to call that a win. :3

Part II is definitely kicking off around the 30k mark. I'm so excited!

RPGC #6: The NaNo One!

This was a little bit of a longer day today, I got 2500 words into a scene before I made myself stop, scribble some "do this tomorrow" notes, and close Scrivener. That puts me at 27,700-ish, more than 1000 words ahead! Yay!

Our Heroines are finally getting a little of their own back, and a character I'm really enjoying writing had an "Oh, so that's what it does," moment. Well, she really knew what it did the whole time, but the other two people with her had no idea. Lots of fun!