I didn't win NaNo but...

I've decided that what with one thing and another, I'm not going to reach 50k by midnight.

I had an assignment due in yesterday, I work full time, I've had meetings that I had to go to in the evenings, and basically that all added up to no time to actually sit down and write.

But! I've decided I'm not going to look on this as a failure. This month I've written a heck of a lot more than I would have thought I could squeeze in around all the other things I was doing. I've got a good proportion of a story that I'm actually very pleased with, and I'm determined to finish writing the story in December. And having decided to accept that I'm not going to race the clock to write 12k words in the next 6 hours, which I probably could do if I really BICFOK'd*, I'm going to not stress and just enjoy finishing my story in December.

Anyone else not going to finish but taking a positive from it?

*BICFOK - Bum In Chair, Fingers On Keys

NaNoWriMo progress

After a bit of a shaky start I'm finally getting back on track with my NaNoWriMo. In the end I decided to focus the story mostly on Lois McBride, and Morgan and Ellie Callahan, and write an origin story for Lois. I touched on it in Thief, my Camp NaNo story from last year, but she was a fun character and I wanted to revisit her.

In the process of finding out she's got unusual abilities, Lois is having to cope with usual teenage issues like school, friends and parents, and finds herself in the middle of a disagreement between the Callahans and a casino boss they ripped off when they were in Vegas.

My NaNo stats:
3 - number of days I've written nothing
6 - number of days I've written less than 400 words
8 - number of days I've actually managed more than 1667 words
10,000 - number of words behind where I should be
26,792 - number of words I've written to this point

Things I slightly regret doing in the story:
• Setting the story in Alabama. I've never been to Alabama and have no friends there. I'm not even American! I've been spending a lot of time on tourist websites and Google maps.
• I have no major character who's male. Lois's dad plays an important role and two of Lois's school friends are guys, but they're not major characters. Morgan is, but she's a girl at heart, even when she's a guy.
• The bad guys have a somewhat backseat role until the end. They're vaguely implied as they chase Morgan and Ellie, but they don't appear in the flesh until half way through, and the big Vegas baddie so far has only made an appearance via a phone call.

Do your characters talk?

This caught my eye when I was searching for something (and I can't for the life of me remember what).

I find that I know when I'm in the proper writing zone when it seems like my characters are talking to me rather than me having to think about how they will act. And when I have writer's block, my imaginary friends don't talk to me ;)

Ahchooo!

It's quite late on October 31, I have an assignment due in in just over 12 hours, NaNoWriMo will start at midnight, and I'm ill. This is not a good combination. My head is all stuffy, my eyes are streaming and won't focus properly, I keep getting either too hot or too cold, and I feel like death warmed up. On the plus side, it looks like I'll be having tomorrow off work, so I'll have a few more hours to get my assignment done...

NaNoWriMo short stories

I've decided I'm going to revisit Dawn Bell for NaNoWriMo this year. Dawn is the character who grew out of a Heroes fanfic that I wrote a couple of years ago.

There were several characters in the story that I wrote that I would like to explore more - Lois McBride, a teenager who can see infrared and ultraviolet; Morgan and Ellie Callahan, felonious siblings who can alter their gender and hair/skin/eye colour respectively; and Dawn herself, who can push abilities from one person to another.

I've decided to do a collection of short stories on these characters rather than set out to write a novel-length story straight away, and if the stories end up intertwined then that's great; if they don't, no worries.

Back again for NaNoWriMo 2012

I've had a couple of months off from blogging but now autumn is here I'm starting to get the bug to write more again. I haven't made a proper concerted effort to write fiction for several months and I want to try to get back into that now.

NaNoWriMo is just around the corner now, so I'm planning to do that. What I haven't decided yet is what I want to do. I've been wanting to revisit a story I wrote during Camp NaNoWriMo a couple of years ago, but I was also thinking about doing a short story challenge, and trying to write a different short story every day during November. Of course, there's no reason why I shouldn't do both - I could use the characters from my already-created story Thief and give them more background with short stories focussing on each characters for longer than the ensemble cast of characters in Thief allowed me to.

Children's stories

I've started another course with the Open University, this time in children's literature. I figure if I want to write children's stories I should understand them.

The first part of the course asked about what makes a children's story - what sort of themes run through them, and what common denominators are there to the story?

Some of the themes I found were that the protagonists are children and the antagonist is adult, there is often a well-meaning adult who stops the hero(ine) from doing something important, the children are always right, and they always get away with doing things which would never be allowed in real life.

Any more?