NaNo Again … How Did This Happen?

So apparently I’m attempting NaNoWriMo again this year. Whose idea was this?

Anyway, I’m taking the literary plunge and attempting to get lots of good work done on Behind Glass, which has been sitting on this blog at roughly 25,000 words for a very, very long time. Hopefully by the end of November a winning 50,000 will take it up to 75,000 words, though I’m not convinced it will be finished at the end of November. There’s a lot to get through; I’m not expecting it to be less than 150,000 words by the time it’s done, though hopefully I will be pleasantly surprised. 120,000 would be lovely.

Do I actually expect to get 50,000 words and win this year? Not really, which will be embarrassing after last year – I came in at just under 80,000. Admittedly, I didn’t have a job last year. More specifically, I didn’t have a job that starts late and finishes late. But maybe the lovely NaNo atmosphere will give me a push. At the moment, I’m trying to rework a bit what’s already written and then get a good, detailed plan done for the rest of the story before November, and I came home from work today eager to get a bit more done. That’s a good sign, given when I usually get home, like most people, I feel like collapsing in a heap and not moving until I have to do the work thing all over again the next day.

Buddy me up if you’d like to, all folks and friends also stuffing their Novembers full of glorious words – my username is narwhal_sonnets. If you’re wondering about that, feel free to look up narwhals and sonnets on this blog and learn why.

There will probably be another chance closer to the start mark, but just in case I forget – good luck to all WriMos and I hope your November is incredibly rewarding and productive and awesome.

Still No Scene and Suddenly Bagpipes

Okay, this randomly generated scene is taking much longer to put together than I thought.  Must be all the time I’ve left in between. Normally these things churn out between 30 minutes and two hours. I’ve put too much thought into it over the week, I suppose. It’ll be so disappointing when it eventually goes up and it’s as average as all the others 🙂 Hopefully by the end of the weekend the rest will be scraped together.

Also, what’s up with all these scenes?  No matter what words are generated to work with, they produce misery. The only vaguely non-dark story is the hungry assassins one I wrote for Michelle – that’s right, hungry assassins are the lightest thing I’ve got –  and I had to coax and ridicule that ending out of myself like the almost-empty toothpaste analogy.

I suppose my novels are the same. I’m not so good at making the happy. Misery comes much more naturally. Interesting, when I’ve very little personal experience of honest misery to draw on.

Should probably work more on the happy. Maybe a self-challenge for the randomly generated scene after this one – no chance whatsoever of salvaging the situation these words have produced – to be of slightly lighter content, maybe even a little humorous.

But probably shouldn’t set a challenge I know can’t be done.

Maybe it’s possible, though, if one of the random words is bagpipes. For the following are unfortunate facts:

Suddenly Waterworks = Me+Bagpipes

Severity of Suddenly Waterworks = (Me+Bagpipes)+((Mindset)(Situation))+Amazing Grace

It’s all true.  Sometimes the following is even true:

 Suddenly Waterworks = Me+Just Thinking About Bagpipes.

Pipers appear reasonably frequently in Brisbane; frequent enough to have developed the above equations. But through all of the suddenly waterworks, I find my reaction to bagpipes pretty funny, particularly when mindset and situation are quite low numbers, as they generally are.

Still, should probably never go to the Tattoo.  Likely it would kill me.

(In case anyone’s minded to try them out, mindset and situation are given values equal to or greater than 0, 0 being total neutrality. There is no need to differentiate between emotions when it comes to bagpipes, not when “me” is in the equation)