The Shadows on My Wall Don't Sleep

25,028

That is two days ahead of schedule. :)

Kyle, the big muscle-y computer geek makes lace for a hobby (knit and crochet). XD

It's great for the word count. :)

21,080

For reference, tomorrow's goal would be 20k, the goal for Saturday would be 21,667. So tomorrow I will be aiming for Sunday's goal for 23,334 and two days worth of buffer. I'll probably need it, my hands ached all day today. Unfortunately my prime procrastination activity during NaNo is knitting, which doesn't help the hands at all. XD

Really didn't feel like writing today so I did my word count in extensive notes for myself about the way magic and technology work together, the way people with magical ability are trained, and general appearance and personality notes on my five major characters.

Also, I knit half a slipper.

16,783 words before midnight, 16,856 as of now.

If I wrote 304 more words I'd be a day ahead, but I'm stopping at 13,030 for the night. I'm right in the middle of a scene so finishing that tomorrow should get the ball rolling and hopefully get me to 15k and a full day ahead.

Also, Vinny is awesome. Who cares if the guy he's talking to is a full head taller and much higher in the geek food chain, there will be answers.

I managed to get to 6710 words yesterday, but unfortunately in doing so I managed to squick myself, resulting in an urge to take a shower in bleach.

I know a lot of people take the shortcut of basing characters on people they know. I haven't before and I accidentally did yesterday. If it had stayed to just the one character I probably could have continued on, telling myself I'd tweak him away from the real person in editing. Unfortunately when he needed to mention another character I put down the first name that came to mind and soldiered on. Even that would have been fine but as I was writing I remembered the real person has a real friend by that name and their relationship dynamic puts a hell of a lot of subtext on the relationship between the characters. The next thing I knew I was going "Ew.... Ew ew ew ew... ewewewewEWwww!" as I was trying to write these characters and get to my word count goal.

Obviously this is not a situation that will encourage me to write. It doesn't matter if real person's real friend is white and male and fictional person's fictional friend is black and female, the association has been made in my head.

So today names are being changed. Also, some details. Unfortunately this might not help all that much with the mental associations, but it's the best idea I have other than scrapping the whole thing and starting over with something completely different.

I'm at 3574 words, on schedule and very slightly ahead. While this is good for NaNo terms its not good writing. Today's entire section is filler basically, something I would have written off in a paragraph because it has nothing to add to the story. It does show some small hints of Dan's character, but those could have been woven into more relevant scenes instead. Oh well, this is a rough draft and the time spent typing in filler gives me the opportunity to think ahead and try to figure out what is really going on. Finding a plot early would be nice, as opposed to my usual 15,000 words (or more) into things.

I met the quota for the day, 1670 words in the first scene. I have no idea what is going on but that should surprise no one that has read through my previous NaNo posts.

This story is a bit different from my others, the main difference is that I have a male main character. Normally I write women, often with other women as their close associates. This time I have Daniel and his buddy Mike. I have no idea of Mike is going to be sticking around or if he's just there to get me through today's writing.

I also have A Mystery. I do not, by habit, read mystery stories, so this could be a problem, but I'll see how far I can get before I am written into a corner. XD

So, at some point after I did this post, the site got tweaked and now there are links to a vanity publisher and a hook to collect email addresses. I trust my friends are savvy enough not to buy into the bull. Some of you are already published, others I know are still hunting publishers, and all of you know that you should be paid for publishing your book and not pay out for it. So for the random passers-by, have fun with the toy if you want (though using it will likely increase the Google search rank of the vanity publisher) but don't supply an email address and don't follow the links.

NaNo '06 - This one was a fantasy novel set on an alien world.


NaNo '07 - This one was a cyberpunk novel.


NaNo '08 - This was steampunk with plot flailing issues, it's probably actually two stories all scrambled together.

*cries*

Let's try that again, from the middle of the story rather than my "opening day" writing (even if I do like my opening scene):
I can live with that, especially considering how the stor(y|ies) developed.

NaNo '09 - Urban fantasy with so many problems I may end up cutting it up into a collection of short stories or novellas to save the interesting bits.

Actually, there's been no progress on the actual shawl, instead I have been charting and swatching my ideas.

( Cut for those with absolutely no interest in knitting. )

On the writing front, I still need Character Fifteen for that meme. I have not forgotten it.

I did have a character "drop in" on the drive to Anthrocon last week.

What I know:

• His name is Daniel Samson Greer. I don't know if that's given middle surname or given hyphenated-surname.


• He is tall and lanky. I don't know if he's light as a feather and fragile or deceptively heavy due to wiry muscles.


• He's adult. Based on his appearance people would probably say he's over 25 but probably under 40.


• He has dreadlocks. They are not his natural hair and are brightly colored. There may be tubing or other non-hairlike textured involved. He changes his hair a lot.


• He wears glasses. He might not need them.


• He probably has piercings and tattoos. He wouldn't go for large gauge jewelry, stretching for flesh tunnels or plugs would not appeal to him. Likewise, there's a low chance of facial tattoos or full sleeves, but a back piece might exist.

What I don't know:

• What sort of world he lives in. Other than one that would allow him to have things like his synthetic dreads and glasses. Cyberpunk? Urban Fantasy? Generic now/near future?


• What he does. I'd like something counter to the stereotype presented by his appearance., but the Rule of Cool could override that.


• What he wears. With the dreadlocks there is a tendency to see him in Boots, with jeans or pants with a ton of buckles and D-rings and such. I'd like to break that up a bit.


• What his orientation is. This normally isn't something I plan out, the characters just start talking, or drooling. Generally though they do let me know if I get is wrong.


• What his relationship status is. Rather linked to the above, and again, they generally correct me if I'm wrong.

I had an interesting dream the last night of the con. It was a bit of a muddled mess, as dreams generally are, but there were some ideas in it that I have been rolling around. It was urban fantasy, mixing up magic and hacking, and there were some ideas regarding magic and consent that I'll be mulling over. My POV character in the dream was not Daniel, but maybe this might be his world. That does make me wonder just who my POV female magic user was, I don't know anything about her other than her willingness to top from the bottom in certain, spellcasting obligated, situations.

While we were without internet for all of Friday and half of Saturday I managed to finish up a few knitting projects and write (and get sucked into reading my own writing, again).

I'm still writing biographies for the characters I will be using to answer the questions asked in my last post. Hopefully I'll get a few more questions to work on by the time I'm done with the biographies. Since I have just four out of fifteen done it might take all week unless I hit on a really good writing streak, or learn brevity.

Please feel free to go back and ask more questions. You don't have to work up a "really good one" you know, even simple things like "what is eleven's favorite color" can lead to some character development. :)

( Knitting under the cut! )