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29 November 2009

NaNoWriMo 2009 Day Twenty-Eight


Word Count: 45 422
Radical narrative shifts: 2


One of the fun things about doing a full draft - meaning a draft of a story with a beginning, middle, and end - within November is the length of the thing. I'm just not capable of going much beyond 50k in one month without having some kind of nervous breakdown / horrendous lapse of personal hygiene. What this means is that there are enormous gaps in the narrative that are waiting to be filled in later.

One consequence of this situation is that as the climax approaches, I'm throwing everything and the kitchen sink into the mix in order to make sure that my heroine arrives at the end (mostly) intact, if profoundly changed.

So I'm seeing a proliferation of deus ex machina right now. If I were writing a play for an ancient Greek audience, it would be a massive hit, no doubt. Or at the very least, satisfy some of their aesthetic criteria. As it stands, the work of December (and possibly but hopefully not beyond) is going to be to carefully seed all this last minute information into what came before. Presto, chango! Deus ex machina, gone!

(What's the plural of deus ex machina, anyway? Dei ex machinae, or something?)

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