NaNoWriMo Progress: Day 10

[kaasirpent]

NaNoWriMo Progress: Killing Time
	Actual	Required
Progress
New Words Today	3617	1667
Daily Average	2620	1667
Remaining Req'd Daily Avg	1191 2441	1667
Expected Total	75000	50010

Notes:

• Back in the saddle. :) My eye is much better, as it always is the day after. By Friday I won't even see the halo around every point source of light. More importantly, all the stuff I thought about yesterday, I could write today.


• The character that I had in jail is still in jail. I turned the Despair-O-Meter™ up to 11 on him, dropped him in a cell with no friends, no family, and no lawyer (she left to go find a judge to set bail—yes, I'm aware it probably doesn't work that way: I'll fix it in the rewrite), and no one who believes a word he says about being innocent, including his own lawyer. Then, this being a time travel story, I went back to the future, wrote their reactions to his plight, and had them send someone back a few extra days to see if they could figure out how to get him out. They won't get him completely out of being suspected of the crime, but I suspect he'll miraculously be found innocent and let go a few scenes down the road.

  "Wait a minute. I'm sitting in a time machine! I have all the time in the world! I'll just go back an extra ten minutes... — Marty McFly



• I've added a new character to accomplish this. Not new, but a minor character I added to be the voice of the reader earlier on is now the POV character who is back in the past trying to do cleanup. And part of this means the incredibly tedious task of crashing a frat party. Poor, poor Harriman.


• No, I've never been to a frat party. Or in a frat house. But I'm a writer. I'll make it up. (And then ask a frat-rat friend to read it and critique it. :)


• Although perhaps 'frat-rat' is not the right phrase to use to convince someone to give me a useful critique.


• Yes, time travel is hard! Let's go shopping!


• Here's my favorite sentence from everything I wrote today: "Cables, wires, pipes, and conduits sprouted in 30 directions, and the whole assembly looked like a demented octopus had tried to construct its own version of Frankenstein's monster."


• I also like the phrase "causality ripples" just a little too much. I'll either end up basing everything on that or killing it entirely. They do say to kill your darlings, and that is, I think, my favorite phrase to come out of the entire 26,000 words, so far.


• Oh, you'll notice there are two progress meters on the left, one for 50,000 words and one for 75,000. Also, under "Remaining Req'd Daily Average," I put two numbers, one for meeting the 50,000-word requirement, and one for meeting the 75,000-word one.

 Cancer by Sick Puppies from Dressed Up As Life (Rating: 0)

Comments

[lepusdomesticus.livejournal.com]

I don't think I really buy the "kill your darlings" idea. My current project is totally self-indulgent. I've put in absolutely everything I've felt like putting in, and it's easily the best thing I've ever written. Then again, it's also 200,000+ words and only (if I'm lucky) about 40% done (this is the rough draft, though. The agony of killing my darlings will come in the rewrite, alas.). I'm also completely nuts.

I think the "kill your darlings" thing is like a habit. You know, if it negatively affects your life, then it's a problem. If not, who cares? So too the phrases you are most attached to in a work of fiction--if it's obvious that you have structured the entire paragraph (or even the whole novel) around one phrase that's not nearly as brilliant as you think it is, then you should probably cut it. If it drags readers out of the story, or messes up the plot or your whole world-building, then you should definitely cut it.

Or you can do what I do, and make a huge elaborate subplot explaining why that word is actually the word you really meant. This is how you get 1,000,000 word epics. ;)

Also, I'm impressed you're 10,000 words ahead of required.

[kaasirpent]

Thanks. I'm kind of impressed, too. Once I have seen the scene in my head, I guess it's easier to write it down, and that's what I'm doing with this. I've written roughly 30,000 words, and I'm just about to get to the second scene of the original 11,000-word novell{a|ette}.