InsaneJournal

NaNoWriMo Novel - Moving Forward
I'm going to do all my NaNoWriMo rambling in this post, because I don't want to clog my journal with this kind of thing.



11/2
I have to say, this was the easiest plotting I have ever done. When I started, I planned on a Martha-centric story about her joining Torchwood. It turned into a gen fic involving the entire team, with each member getting their own chapter. Although I still consider it more focused on Martha and Jack. I've never had an easier time writing for a cast of characters not mine; Jack, Ianto, Gwen, Martha, and Mickey all have roles and their stories tie into each other so easily. Using Scrivener probably helped the process a lot, too.

I have about 4k words so far, right on my personal goal of 2k/day. Thus far, I'm still writing chronologically, and I'm about halfway through Jack's chapter (assuming each chapter will be 10k). Something interesting happened right away.

There was a baby at the Torchwood Hub. Somehow, despite having seen aliens that feed on sex and a sociopathic ex-lover from the 51st century, this was the weirdest and most baffling thing that had happened.

I didn't plan that at all, but I kept writing, figuring this baby would be gone by the end of the chapter. Nope. She winds up getting dubbed "Gail" by Gwen later, and then I decide to take the original idea I had for this chapter (theoretically immortal jelly fish aliens!), make her into an alien/human hybrid, keep her around, and really go crazy with Doctor/Jack/Gail parallels. It works, in a weird way.

I'm loving NaNoWriMo this year! :D

11/11
I fell behind on the 5th, and I just barely recovered on the 9th, but I'm behind again. I just hit 17k (one third of the way, WHOO!!) today, obviously short of the 22k I want to be at. Plot details are demanding attention, so I had to take some time to plot which ate into my writing like whoa. I have a feeling I'll be using the weekend to catch up, since my time's pretty limited until Friday afternoon. (And WHY OH WHY did I launch my comic the day before NaNo? I lack critical thinking skills at times...)

Thankfully, Gail started talking to me again, because it's really, really hard to make an OC useful if she won't do anything or have a personality XD

But I'm still loving it. I seriously have an attitude of losing just not being a possibility this year. And the writing is absolutely horrible, but I actually managed to make my inner editor shut the hell up because she can have fun in about a month tearing this story to shreds.

11/14
I've never done this before, but I restarted on the 13th. LOL. I got one of the pep talks in my e-mail the same day I considered switching story ideas, and it was one about not restarting your novel. Oops. XD So I did some quick math, and found I needed 3k words/day in order to finish, so I challenged myself to write 3k words last night, or else I have to back to slogging forward with Song of the Nightengales. I got to 3k easy! I'm trying to do 5k a night for this weekend, which will get me to 18k by Monday. (I'm about 2k/5k for tonight so far.)

Still fanfic. House and Wilson always find a way to invade my brain, but at least they're giving me plenty to work with. Yes, they hook up in the end, but there's like, an actual plot, and all the other characters are actually involved! ZOMG. The working title is "Moving Forward," which actually might stick...

And I just finished the best House-Cuddy banter EVAR, and killed myself with this line: “That country you’re visiting. It wouldn’t happen to rhyme with ‘vagina,’ would it?”

There are three OCs. One of which is a character from one of my very dead comics. I shall wildly amuse myself with references to it.

11/17
I fail. Okay, not really. I only got up to 14k for the weekend. That's still pretty good, I only need a bit less than 2,600 words/day to win now. I have a lot of dead time today and tomorrow, and I'll try to go for multiple 5k days next weekend, too.

I'm actually ridiculously glad I switched stories, because this one is paced perfectly so far. Okay, there's the possibility I'll get weird after seeing a new episode of House, because I'm such a canon whore even though I already told myself this story is AU...right after last week's episode. Yeah. Not having that this year. I must win, damnit!

This fic is turning out rather different in feel from most of my others. It's like...gen-flavored slash (slash-flavored gen?). I just spent the last few thousand words on backstory between an OC and Wilson...And my word-padding technique is just have House have weird dreams/hallucinate. But they keep ending up relevant. *fail at wordpadding*

“Was I?” Amber asked. She leaned on House’s desk. “Here’s another important question: why is your subconscious so concerned about having sex with Wilson?”

My geeky reward for myself if I get to 17k by tonight: I'll let myself finally post an excerpt on the NaNoWriMo site. Yay.

11/21
Rough week, I wasn't sure I'd be able to keep up with my goals, but only fell a little behind. I'm up to 20k, and want to get 25k by tonight and 35k by Sunday night.

And, wow, this story is taking it's sweet time in regards to both the main plot and the subplots. I know how I want House and Wilson's relationship to progress, it's just taking a while, and I know under what general circumstances I want them to kiss, but I have no idea when that will happen...I am waiting in suspense here XD

Amusingly, "Nurse Brad" as fandom dubbed him, just made a really random cameo only to say that Wilson should wear jeans more often. (Who can disagree with that?)

I have a sneaking suspicion this might wind up being more than 50k. Crap.

11/30
Oh my god, I'm not going to win ;_; I'm just now getting to 35k, and I'm going to aim for at least 40k by tonight so I can at least beat last year's word count. But there's no way I can get 15k in the next six hours. Trust me, I've tried!

12/1
I wrote 38,041 words. For this story. I did about 52,000 for the entire month including the first story I ditched. And yet I don't regret it at all, and I'm not disappointed about not crossing the finish line, yet again. But I beat last year's 35,000, making this the longest story I've written, and also one of the easiest.

I'm still writing, but the story's pretty much done. I wrote the ending a few hours ago, and it was probably the single most satisfying experience I've had with writing. It really felt like I went on a journey with the characters. This is the first year I came out of NaNoWriMo with a usable first draft. After I finish writing up some additional scenes and fleshing out a few others, I can just ignore this draft until my winter break, when I will edit like crazy. It's not disjointed mess like last year's.

And I definitely love working with Scrivener. I'll be using it again next year, and for pretty much any lengthy story from now on.

He knew Wilson got into his boring car and drove over to his apartment to sleep in his bed because Wilson wanted to be with him, and that was pretty much the answer to everything Wilson does. Even if very stupid parts of House’s brain couldn’t quite grasp at that fact.

Hey, I'm happy =)

12/21
The dreaded editing phase where the magic happens! I just re-read the whole thing and took notes...there's chunks of text that's just going to get deleted, and other chunks that are going to get transplanted to other parts. And lots of rewriting so it doesn't sound like I was sleep-deprived while writing it.