Just a quick update on my decision-making about what to write for this year’s NaNoWriMo.

In the end, I found more than half a dozen ideas I could plausibly work on, including another attempt at the Kissiltur books and a new story about space-faring dragonflies. All of these sound great (even the Kissiltur one, although it’s not really a NaNo project) but I can only pick one.

And the one I have picked is the second book of Song, currently called Some Cinnamon Harmonies*. I will be thinking about that story as I continue work on third pass edits on the first book, then start prep in earnest in October.

I’m excited. The second story line in the original book was a lot of fun to write, and I am looking forward to reworking it into a full length novel.

[*] of course, as soon as I made this decision I started coming up with plot ideas for a second Livia book along with several others, but ’twas ever thus. They are captured and boxed for now.

It’s early September which means it must be time to start thinking about NaNoWriMo, right?

I will be doing a series of posts on NaNo prep in October, following my own prep of whatever story I decide to work on. I have two probable ideas:

1. the second Song book. The zeroth draft of Song turned out to be two books smooshed together. What I am nearing completion on now is the first book expanded out to make an entire story, but I want to have the second book written at some point too.
2. rewrite Livia. As I mentioned in the wake of the Willamette Writers Conference, I am planning on reissuing Livia as a better book then continuing that series into the other parts of the world that Rome interacts with.

Unlike when I first wrote Livia, the answer to this question is not “both” because I would rather write one 80-100k book than two 50-60k books. At this point I am leaning pretty hard towards Song II (Cinnamon Harmonies, perhaps?) but I should make a formal selection.

My process for choosing which story to do (assuming I have several ideas and need to make a choice) is to write up a short treatment on each, then read them back the next day to see which one engages me more. This has been very helpful in the past when I’ve had several competing ideas, and the one I thought I was going to do beforehand turned out to be the least engaging story!

Do you have plans for NaNoWriMo this year? How will you choose what to write?

it is, you know

It is almost time for National Novel Writing Month. This will be my thirteenth go at it, and although I no longer need it in order to write, this frenzied month is still when I do most of my initial drafting.

But what to write? And how to prepare?

This Year’s Story

The novel I am writing for 2016 is a story that I have tried to write before, a story about superhumans and the end of the world. I last tackled this story in 2006 and it was very close to being a disaster: that’s the year I came closest to not finishing*, and the result was bad. Not all the way through, of course: there are scenes and fragments in there that are worthwhile still, but the total assembly of words was awful.

It was still a story I wanted to tell, though. I began one alternate approach to it as a bedtime story for my oldest, although it never got more than a few scenes in and I didn’t write it down at the time. I’ve also been pottering about with superhumans in my roleplaying setting A New Dawn, and as I restarted that again I realised I wanted to have another go at the abandoned novel.

So here I am, turning over the soil, looking for the bones of the story.

This Year’s Prep

Last year I took part in a trial outing for a NaNoWriMo prep course being run by Kim at MuseCraft. I’ve been using those same steps this year, since they seemed to help before.

I have to admit, however, that I only began these steps after a couple of false starts.

The first thing I tried was to capture the opening scenes from my bedtime retelling of the story, which led me into the same traps as the original failed novel since it was freighted with many of the same issues (I also couldn’t remember all that much except that there were a couple of things I definitely did not want to use). The second thing I did was to build a character network using the Fiasco method, which works a lot better when the characters have some direct connections at the start of the story. Then, finally, I remembered the successes of last year’s prep exercises and fell back into those.

But all of this has been helpful in uncovering the story I want to tell and the way I want to tell it. There are no wasted words**.

I’m getting into the plot part of the prep next and then it’s time for chapter outlines.

This Year’s Enthusiasm

Two weeks to go. I’m going to be ready. Are you?

[*] there is a thing in NaNoWriMo culture that the second year is the hardest, but for me it was the third.

[**] … as I say to myself when justifying abandoning eight years of work.