NaNoWriMo Day Twenty-Nine

Word Count: 50139 / 50031 (according to the NaNoBots)

Authors who need a drink: 1

Well, that was satisfying. And an amazing release. I'm off to hug my pets and feed them treats and to try to put back together the shambles that I have traditionally called my home and love life.

NaNoWriMo Day Twenty-Eight

Word Count: 48320
Spectacular monster-slaying stage plays: 1
Displays of supernatural powers: 3
Hilarious lines: lots, I hope, but my favourite one is this, shouted by an old woman heckler after witnessing a particularly scourge-eriffic display of supernatural powers:

"Jesus Christ you ain't!"

Oh man, it's been a long month. I've experienced quite the learning curve. Everything they say is true: novel writing is like a long, solitary trip across the desert of yourself. Or maybe (if you're lucky) the dessert of yourself. The worst moments are right before you sit down for a writing session. If you can get your bum in your chair and a pen in your hand and even one word down on that page (after procrastinating further by numbering your page and carefully noting the date at the top) you'll probably be fine.

In the grand scheme of things, I'm just under halfway to a full draft of the novel. But I'm quite sure now that I can do it.

NaNoWriMo Day Twenty-Seven

Word Count: 45906
Zombicidal children: 12, give or take
Troupes of slightly nonthreatening monsters: 1

I didn't intend for the monsters to be friendly. HOW DID THE MONSTERS BECOME FRIENDLY?

Because they all have their own stories, that's how. Well, crap. There's a layer of complication that I hadn't banked on.

At the same time, I think my overarching metaphor - the one about power - just got a lot more complex and interesting.

NaNoWriMo Day Twenty-Six

No new words today. I decided to take the day to do some research that's essential to generating the next 8k and completing the NaNoWriMo challenge. This pause for recherche is actually making me far more excited about the next section of writing than if I'd barrelled on through. Don't get me wrong: barrelling is important and fun.

But you know what K. Rog has to say:

NaNoWriMo Day Twenty-Five

Word Count: 42361
Deadly moral interludes: 1
Heart-munching: 1 heart, 3 munches
Appearances of Satan: 1
Plague sores: dozens

The devil I'm dealing with is only an ersatz devil, a perhaps-once-human person whom time and circumstance has utterly transfomed. But when I wrote the scene I was thinking of images like this one, purportedly of St. Augustine and the Devil, painted by Michael Pacher in 1480:

I don't know anything about Pacher, but Hugo Zoom observes this about the painting:

I have seen this painting referred to as Saint Wolfgang and the Devil as well as SaintAugustine and the Devil. I'm inclined to believe it's Wolfgang, as the devil's butt would quit smirking if he was dealing with St. Augustine.

I love images like this one because the devil looks so totally alien. A confection of otherness. Especially because his butt is smirking.

So too the devil in this Daniel Hopfer etching. Hopfer was a late 15th / early 16th century artist. We've got a firebreathing crotch here, and numerous devils flying overhead and creeping behind the trees in the background. But at least for now, it seems the three old women are able to triumph over evil.

It's a wonderful image because these women, in their decrepitude and flowing longhairedness and wrinkliness and overall crone-like gorgeousness, would have been the sort to most likely appear in medieval and renaissance art as being in cahoots with the devil. Not beating him (or her, if you take the cue of the devil's breasts) into submission.

NaNoWriMo Day Twenty-Four

Word Count: 38773
Dead monarchs: 1
Famous playwrights: 2
Creepy moral interludes: 1

Finally moved on, after much ado, to the second part of the book. Woo, and hoo. And holy crap.

The way things have turned out, November, which has included all the support that you get from the writing collective as you soldier through the NaNoWriMo challenge, has felt kind of like training for a marathon. December is going to be the marathon.

I can't wait. I've been fearing writing this part of the book because I feel it's under researched. I didn't read the scads of biographies I'd planned to on Marlowe and Shakespeare.

But writing them, especially writing them into a clandestine meeting of a secret vampiric underworld, well, I've decided to wing it. I've been studying what they wrote for years.

Of course I know these two. Very well. Once might say intimately, even.

NaNoWriMo Day Twenty-Three

Word Count: 37009
Formerly syphilitic and currently cruel generals: 1
Public executions by burning: lots

I'm still kind of stuck on Mary. I'd had no idea that she would be such a key figure before I started writing this. It's downright fun, though, and she makes an awesome villain, one that I might regret losing. I don't think there's enough for her to make her own novel, but she's certainly cool enough to give Elizabeth I a run for her money.

I'm hoping a couple of things at this point:
1) that my currently hinky internet connection holds steady.
2) that my bedroom ceiling doesn't fall down before I'm done my complete draft (ETA: December 21)

Is that too much to ask?

NaNoWriMo Day Twenty-Two

Word Count: 35 008
Plot developments with which I am totally surprised: 2 or 3
Messes that I'll have to deal with in revision: 2 or 3

I'm happy with the scenes of gore and grue I'm working on. I've finally managed to work in a scene that combos vampiric grossitude and syphilis, which has (naturally) been my dream since, well, forever. (Read: since I started researching the history of syphilis for my doctorate.)

Syphilis. Yum.

NaNoWriMo Day Twenty-One

No words on the 21st. I just finished counting up my words for the 20th, and it's five to eleven and I'm in favour of sleep over word count tonight. I'm on my own tomorrow late afternoon and evening, so I'm hoping for a productive day.

Plus I'm kind of drunk. Darn D.'s boss for giving us an amazing bottle of pinot grigio. Darn the Dog Whisperer for being so entertaining that I just had to watch another episode. Darn the landlord for being so much of a jerk that he inspired yet another discussion about how soon we can get outta here. Darn life for being...life and stuff. Darn the bed for looking so comfortable.

NaNoWriMo Day Twenty

Word Count: 33091
Beheadings: 1, the regular political kind
Nefarious enemas: 1
Bloody tyrants coming into power: 1

I'm not totally sure about the enema. It might be a little bit over the top.

On the other hand, I'm thinking a lot more about staying in the present tense and avoiding the problematic territory of the flashback and the recollection.

I guess for me part of the problem is that I think conflicted people - heck, all people - tend to haul the past into the present on a constant basis. Unless you're a saint, the past is there, informing your decisions.

Like your decision to give your little brother an enema using your own vampirically infected blood.

Too much? Too soon?

I have so much trouble discerning where the line is these days.

NaNoWriMo Day Nineteen

No words today. I'm fighting the flu. I'm close to par; things have been going well. Days like this are what padding is for, right? Sleep now.

NaNoWriMo Day Eighteen

Word Count: 31027
Scenes of mass slaughter: 1
Profound transformations: 1
Deus ex machina: 1
Deus ad machina: 1

Now that everyone who's not dead is radically changed, I must introduce some new characters.

NaNoWriMo Day Seventeen

Word Count: 28920
Demonic inversions of the miracle play: 1
Staged crucifixions that are real crucifixions: 3
Instances of heart munching: 2

Chris Baty and sundry NaNoWriMo cheerleaders claim that things get easier once you clear 30k words. I have to say that although I enjoyed the 20k zone, I can see that things are getting easier now.

Because this project isn't just a daily word count any more. It's a book in waiting. It's a commitment.

Driving to tai chi this morning, I thought about the book after this one, and the one after that. (It's a series.) Likewise, I thought about my NaNo novel: the section after the one I'm writing, and the two sections to follow. I've been thinking about writing this project for such a long time, but only in the last few days has it begun to feel like something I will actually do. My feeling about it has changed from an amused speculative mode to an anticipation of setting my pen to the page and getting it all down. Of shaping it and surprising myself with how it all shakes out.

There's a tangible difference between a dream and a goal. Both are important to have, of course, but it feels so very good to be working toward something real and concrete. To be bringing an idea into the world.

NaNoWriMo Day Sixteen

Word Count: 26746
Monstrous births: 1
Hostile angels: 1

The imagination factory is working overtime, which is great.

Today I was thinking about completing something. I'm thinking ahead to how I'm going to complete the draft of this novel. I plan to keep going through December and January to finish the draft, and to try and polish 'er up. Much of NaNoWriMo involves writing by the seat of your pants in the name of sticking to the all-important word count. It's been really interesting to see where that takes me, while I try to adhere to my (very general) story outline.

I'm thinking about how I'm going to finish this beast and what I'm going to do when I'm done (uh, hello: agent search? portfolio building?). And that's making me think about working on some shorter pieces intermittently over the next little while. I'm craving the sort of focus that comes from editing and polishing and, well, completing. That sort of finished feeling seems, at this point in the program, very far away and in the distant future.

I've got a couple of short story drafts kicking around. I think I'll do some fiddling, just to give the old editor something to do.

NaNoWriMo Day Fifteen

Word Count: 24593
Broken legs: 1
Broken necks: 1
Broken heads: 1
Broken spirits: a churchfull

I usually divide my time on Saturdays between running around and socializing. Agility lessons for the dog were cancelled yesterday because of bad weather, though, so I slipped in some unexpected writing in the early evening, before D and I headed out to a friend's birthday bash. I will probably pass the NaNoWriMo halfway point later today, and to be on par by bedtime tonight. Woot!

Still playing around with POV in the scene I'm writing. In the previous scene, which was about a big reveal, I was using multiple (sympathetic) points of view, and flipping back and forth between them. I'm working with using POV as a sort of cinematic technique: five points of view = five different camera angles on the scene.

In the scene I started yesterday, I shrank the POV down to one character whose perceptions are substantially compromised. My theory is that this will help build suspense. It's certainly made it fun to write.

NaNoWriMo Day Fourteen

Word Count: 23477
Actors in danger: 6 or 8
Enormous stages: 1
Savage dramatics: coming soon
Bonk bonks on the head: 6 or 8


Bonk Bonk on the Head


I'm having a fun time managing the tricky logistics behind multiple POVs in a single scene. My heroes right now are the troup of actors, mentioned above. So far, four of them have significant things to say, but I've made sketchy references to a couple of "extras". Hum...they might have to be emphasized in the second draft. But I've been flipping around between different members of the group as they go into a tense scenario. It's an interesting game; I'll leave it up to my revision to decide if it works.

Do any of you flip around among perspectives as you describe a scene? Does this raise tension, or scatter the scene's energy?

NaNoWriMo Day Thirteen

Word Count: 20819
Revelations: several
Frightened villagers: 1 village's worth
Actors on the trail of monsters: 1 troup

The question of the day has to do with information distribution: how much is too soon? I figured in the earlier scenes of the novel, if I didn't have somebody explaining some of the really important core notions, I might forget them myself.

Now I think I might have blown my wad waaay too early.

It's okay though, because it's only a first draft. I'm making notes to erase and rewind some of the less graceful expository moments of chapter one. Making plans to strategically release information on the basis of when knowing it will inflict maximum damage on my MCs.

Bwah ha ha.

NaNoWriMo Day Eleven

Remembrance Day today. Whatever you call it, it's good to take a moment and remember people who sacrificed themselves for you, especially those who died violently. Veterans, I salute you.

No words today. I was here having my energy tweaked. Highly recommended for what ails ya, whatever that may be.

But I'm gonna be ready to take on a new chapter tomorrow! Go, turtle crew, go!

NaNoWriMo Day Ten

Word Count: 16733
Zombie Queens of England: 1
Assassinations by trepanning drill: 1
Mouldy Kings of England: 1
Successions to the throne by boring children: 1
Angry bitch aspirants to the throne: 1

I'm finished with Mary for now. I think it's interesting when you write a villain that you end up liking. Although yes, she's technically on the wrong side of things, there's something fun about giving evil some plausible motivations.

I like a monster who isn't totally inhuman.

You know?

NaNoWriMo Day Nine

Word Count: 14740
Poisonings by zombie blood: 1
Horses with a taste for human flesh: 1
Births: 1
Wives of Henry VIII: three down; three to go

I hadn't intended to make Mary I a character in this book. She really is a dour sort if you judge by her portraits.

(Portrait by Hans Eworth, done between 1555 and 1558, and therefore during her brief rule and not so long before her death.)

I thought that Mary and her fellow monarchs would remain figures in the background, using the power of vampires to keep the common people down, but who wouldn't make many personal appearances. But to give the book texture, and to give more context for why the low characters are encountering vamps and zombies by the bucketfull, I decided to add her and some others (so far, Henry VIII, Jane Seymour, little Elizabeth I - soon, Edward VI, Philip II, James I, Charles I) into the mix.

And it must have been tough for her - being interested in killing people and flip-flopping England back to Catholicism after the measures taken by her little brother Edmund couldn't have been easy. There are apologists who claim that had she been able to live longer than she did, she might have been able to establish peace long enough to return England back to stability, and she might have secured it as a Catholic nation.

I keep lingering on this detail of her long final illness, however, that she apparently thought she was pregnant on more than one occasion, the first of which was in 1554. Eventually it turned out that she was suffering from a large cyst. She went to her death believing that she was pregnant, declaring her husband Philip II of Spain regent or guardian of her child after her death.

That's gruesome enough for me to spin into a malicious bodily plot. In my treatment of Mary, her crimes against humanity are largely driven by a lifelong habit of sipping the blood of vampires.

Bloody Mary, indeed.