notes - success and thoughts

WOO! And with that, folks, 50k has been achieved.

The late Thanksgiving this year nearly did me in - luckily, I'd built up enough buffer through the month that I was alright taking a day off, and sneaking in a few hundred words here and there between some family time. Yaaayyyyyyy.

So! Echoes in the Garden now has 84032 subplots! And some backstory sorted. A few new characters. But mostly, some plot, which it desperately needed.  Year 1 it got a setting and some pretty, year 2 it got a lot of characters, year 3 it got some storyline.  Well, moments of drama at least.  If I get them strung together a lil more nicely in the editing, I should be able to wring a plot out of them. ;)

I also didn't have to revert to too many dirty tricks to get the word count going - only a few passages of description-heavy nonsense, and way fewer song lyrics, ha.

Obviously, no, the story doesn't have an ending yet - wasn't planning to get to it this year anyway, since I still need to re-construct the elements into a better plotline before I can sort out what its resolution is going to be.  But I do have a few ideas on that front at least.  Which is major progress, ha.

Yaaaayyyyyyyy.

note - drama and failure

So, you know how Kimber was mentally exhausted after seeing Azal and Celestine?  Yeah, so was I.

That was NOT a scene I had planned.  I knew there had to be some kind of secret uncovered by visiting the carriage house, but I really had no idea what when she walked in there (obviously lol).  Finally, the thought of people coming back from a ride popped into my head.  And then the rest clicked into place, and some other things clicked into place (which might take some retroactive date adjustments in previous chapters, I'm afraid), and... well, there we were.  Azal wasn't going to let that scene go any other way.

Translation notes:
bella donna - Italian, pretty woman
ástin mín - Icelandic, my love
(...I'd actually rather have thrown in some Semitic language or another, but, I'm typing on a Linux-based laptop, and have enough issues with specialized Roman characters, wasn't even gonna try to get Arabic or Hebrew working right on there. And Google Translate doesn't do Sumerian or Akkadian yet, le sigh.)

So last night, I had NO idea where on earth to go or what on earth I was going to do.  But I had to let poor Kimber (and me) have a little breather.  So I tried...

...and then major U2 news broke on the internet and the Twitter-based fandom exploded, so, uh, kinda distracted lol.  Add just enough headache to break any real concentration ability, and I knew it was a pretty hopeless night.  But I wanted to at least "check in" with the story - and a little thinking about it and a few random idea prompts throughout today got me going again.

And then of course I hit an info-dump section, and now I've spent as much time sorting out details and timelines (which will probably change anyway) as I have writing. argl. I did have a decent timeline worked out, but, I keep throwing monkeywrenches into relationships, so it's messing with the original structure a bit!

Oh. And yes, Alison is more than a little based on my own little sister.  Sorry Mel.  Made for an easier wordcount boost. ;p

note - unexpected and wordcount explosion

So, the whole bit in yesterday's post where Meres shows up? COMPLETELY UNPLANNED. She walked into the gallery, started looking at pictures (content which I shamelessly snagged from the YWP's Dare Machine), and then... and then.  It was terrifying and wonderful and really hard to write, actually, that photo of Meres formed in my mind and I just... I had to keep pausing while writing, which is a little unusual with a scene that intense, normally I'll just blast right through it.  But my heart was breaking and I had to keep stepping away to breathe.

This is the miracle of NaNoWriMo. <3

Today was the NaNoThon - combination fundraising/wordcount-boosting day.  Most years, this has gone largely uncelebrated by me, but there was soooo much going on via Twitter all day that it actually kinda felt like a holiday to me.  I really felt like I was write-in with the whole internet all day, it was absolutely lovely.  (Also, I was smart, and took a notebook over to the beach to sit and write somewhere else for awhile.  Got a day's worth done there!)  I've been writing on and off since finishing work today, and it's been awesome to spend such a good chunk of time in the world of the novel.

Oddly, I've been writing scenes out of order a lot this year.  The (upcoming) scene with Mary was written before the one with Anna, simply because it popped into my head more clearly first.

Half of the things that went down (and most of the metaphors/similes!) in the scene with Anna were inspired by random flashcard word-prompts from a brief livestream by the NaNo folks.  A bit of random input always works well for me.

Head's up, today's chunk IS A DOOZY.  My goal was to write 3334 (twice the normal daily allotment), and I'm currently a bit over.  Not posting yet because I may add some more to it before the day's out, just because.  I have my pirate hat on and busted out some typing-mitts, so it has been a wordcount-beefing kind of day.

Plus I love scenes with Mary.  She cracks me up. <3

note - beginnings and resumings

I'll start getting the blog prettified soon - I know it's dull and drab and link-less and wordcounter-less right now. But I had a loooot of re-reading to do (once I finally decided I was doing this, and what I was doing)...

Using a different word processor than usual, thanks to Mr Husband putting a "better" Linux onto my laptop. (Those quotes are there for a reason.) Haven't decided if it's gonna work, but, I found a built-in word count, so that's helpful at least.

Still thrown by doing NaNo when it's 80-some degrees outside. Too warm for all my typing-mitts!  But fine for NaNoWriMo t-shirts.  Luckily, a pack of dark stormclouds showed up just as I set in to start writing tonight, so that at least made me feel a little better. Rain would be fantastic.

Feel free to buddy me on the NaNo website (Ananda Daydream) or follow me on Twitter (@anandadaydream)!  I'm not foreseeing any major thwarts to my writing plans this month - nothing much on the calender, anyway, and the shops have slowed down for the season - buuut writer's block never needs a reason to show up.  Luckily, in my re-reading, I made insane amounts of notes (as you may've noticed), and was able to find a few loose threads I can pick back up if I get stuck.  And an awful lot of the music Kimber had been listening to is still on my Zune - though I'm not sure I'll be able to avoid her adding some Sigur Rós and/or Jónsi to that list this year. (Finally caught a concert last month, and I'm 74302x more in love than ever.)

Super grateful to the me-of-two-years-ago for having left off smack in the middle of a scene with a chatty ten-year-old. x)