The Shadows on My Wall Don't Sleep

I think this one was made possible, or at least much easier, by Scrivener. So when I get my 50% off winner coupon on December 5th I think I'll be using it. :)

For the record, 50,893 words. :D

Given I pretty much started over twice, first by doing a time jump on the main character and then by shuffling chapters, there is a lot of very heavy editing and rewriting needed before this even has a hope of seeing the light of day. I like it. Things I thought to add at the very end of the process (the last three chapters, pretty much) mean I really, really need to rewrite, but I have a much better idea of what I need and what I don't.

The idea I had mid-way through the month, to toss at least three of these characters and the basic set up into my 2009 NaNo story, is still digging at me. Given how much would have to change about them and the situation to make it work I may still do it and keep this story. All the characters would get new names and probably new faces and would end up very different I think.

It's been a while, so NaNo status catch up time.

I didn't write at all the day before Thanksgiving. My motivation hit the dirt and buried itself six feet under. I managed not to let myself fall more than a day behind after that and managed to catch up again on Friday.

Then Kris decided to derail me with my Christmas present. I've posted about that more completely at my "archive dolly stuff" journal on LJ.

For those that don't want to read that, well there are some photos under the cut that will explain things. ( Looky what Kris gave me! )

It's been a week, I should probably update those of you that care.

When last I wrote on the subject I had mentioned thinking about jumping my key character, Karen, up three years in age. I did do that. Scrivener's index card synopsis feature and document notes made it really easy to just to through and leave myself notes about the new age she should be in each chapter. So I did that on the eighth while finishing up chapter three.

While ending chapter four I noticed something I really should have noticed before NaNo even started. I had misplaced the blue moon. So, after beating my head on the desk for a bit, I went and fixed that. One index card on the cork board dragged from the end of the manuscript to the beginning and then going and readjusting all the ages again took care of the bulk of that. Now I have four chapters to either rewrite or time shift plus one entirely empty new first chapter.

Then, while writing yesterday, I had a flash of either brilliance or insanity. I've been having a lot of trouble writing this story, which is nothing new since I've had that problem with previous NaNo stories, but I have a pretty good idea of why with this one. The first problem I've already addressed some, that's Karen's young age. Shifting her three years older helped but it still means when I go back and rewrite the beginning I'll be writing a four year old. The other is that I'm writing this four (and five, and six, and...) year old child in a world with a level of technology roughly equivalent to the late eighteenth century. Now I don't think I'm quite as badly off as most Americans are with history, and growing up in Massachusetts gives you mandatory history of things like Plymouth, Salem, and field trips to Old Sturbridge Village, but this doesn't help that much about two and a half decades later when you need to know the minutia of daily life in the late 1700s.

So, the flash of possibly insane brilliance... what if I hadn't set this story in the past? What if I had set it in an alternate universe current time? Like I did with my last two NaNo stories (which is probably why I didn't, at least subconsciously). If I did shift it to a "modern" setting, could I make it in the same world as my 2009 NaNo story?

That one, for those that don't want to go looking at my old posts, didn't really gel into a single story. It ultimately fractured into a bunch of flashbacks as I was struggling to get to 50k at the end of the month. I had decided that when I got back to it I would probably break it up into a series of short stories.

I wrote a lot of notes yesterday, about what I would need to do to shift this story into the same world as the one from 2009. There are quite a lot of things that would have to be changed to make it work. The culture between alternate magical late 1700s and alternate magical early 2000s is very different. I wrote down all the ones that came to mind immediately and the wrenches they threw into my plot (I actually have one this year) and some possible solutions.

While I was doing that I was also wondering if I could, or should, introduce these characters to the ones from 2009. That lead to another flash of inspiration and now I have to change Apollonia's career over in the 2009 story. Changing that makes the story that was trying to evolve around her so much easier! It's enough to make me want to beat my head on the desk some more because it was so obvious what her career should have been. Looking back it was really clear that I was subconsciously shoving her in that direction even while I was trying to write her story. So I have a pile of notes about how I need to change her career, and how by doing that I can take those sections of the story that didn't fit together that well and shuffle them around and suddenly it all works.

I think, if I weren't using Scrivener this year I would have had a meltdown over this story. I would either have one long text file with several chunks separated by white space and notes and would have been scrolling through it for ages trying to keep all the notes updated. Or I would have splintered the file into multiple new files and would have had to splice them to do the final word count verification version. Scrivener lets me keep all those outdated bits I wrote in discrete chunks and allows them to be included in word count without forcing them to be in the same file as what I'm working on now. It also lets me write notes and keep them separate from the story. If you hadn't guessed, I really, really like Scrivener. :)

I'm almost a full day ahead on my word count already with 3101 words right now.

This year I actually have a planned story structure, a beginning scene, an ending scene, and signposts at specific points in time to stop and write. We'll see if this makes things easier or not when I'm further along.

Another new thing for this year is that I'm not writing one big plain text file with nothing but multiple returns or scene dividers to break things up. This year I have the trial for the Windows version of Scrivener running. (Thank you clare_dragonfly for letting me know there was a Windows beta!) The plan is to win NaNo and use the 50% off coupon I will earn to actually buy this software. Last month I spent some time importing my old NaNo stories into Scrivener and even just using it for editing like that made me want it.

( A lot of babbling and some screen caps under the cut. )

Goodness I got wordy. Pity it wasn't novel content. :)

Peter S. Beagle spoke at Anthrocon about how he did a set of stories based on the seasons, each story used the same characters and advanced one year and one season from the one before. I thought that was a very cool idea. So I tried to think of other things that came in "sets" like the seasons so that I could use them as a theme to link stories/chapters/scenes together that way.

One of my old art idea files had an entry about using the names of full moons for a set of drawings. So that's the set I've been poking at, thirteen named moons. Each section of my NaNo would be about four thousand words built around the name of a full moon, progressing in order.

After visiting Wikipedia for a list of full moon names, I tried picking out which names I wanted to use. That has turned out a bit harder than I had expected. I don't want to repeat names, and I prefer the names be somewhat poetic (Moon Before Yule is not making muster). At the moment I'm contemplating two names per moon for most of them, and I haven't decided which moon to start with nor what season to place the blue moon in. I have a loose idea of trying to make time pass in the story so that it takes a (lunar) year and a day.

As you can see, the idea is very vague.

So, anyone have some ideas to toss into the mix? Or a suggestion of something else that comes in a "set" that I could use rather than full moons? I considered astrological signs and think the Chinese would be easier to work with than the western but writing twelve animal themes might be a bit monotonous.