Dragons – Ice and Fury

I took on NaNo as a lark. I first heard about it sometime in mid October and foolishly metioned it to a friend who suggested I give it a go. I was reluctant because…well, I disagree with the premise of these things, and I was well into a novel at the time. But I thought a month long break from my ‘serious’ writing could be beneficial, so I recycled an old yawn that was more or less designed by committee. I sat down and wrote a 17,000 word outline, very formal, plot points identified and so on. And I did some character sketching, nothing too elaborate, about 20 or so major/minor/other players in the drama. All I had to do then was write it all down, which, given the detail in the outline, wouldn’t have been that difficult to accomplish.

It’s a real pot boiler set in post nuclear San Francisco: evil corporations, mutants, zombies, street battles, vampires, a dragon here and there, and my hero, the noirish PI. It also has a few more serious themes: redemption, prejudice, love and revenge, and the butterfly effect–small ripples moving the world forward. I’ll be honest; it has a good setting, strong characters and even a decent plot, but some of the episodes are just outlandish. I’d call it complicated, but my thesaurus doesn’t have more accurate alternatives.

I got started on November 1. I finished a few chapters, one about the global calamity, then one dealing with local conditions, describing the neighborhood and introducing some, but not all, of the characters. Then I ran in trouble, sort of. I described the previous life of my PI hero, then a recent love affair he had with a Salvation Army volunteer, a girl from England. I was about to kill her off according to my outline, when I decided that was far too abrupt, so I expanded her role and started telling her previous life as a long flashback. I’m still on the flashback–it has a bit to go yet–but I’m only 2750 out from the 50k. I’ll probably just stop writing, add a paragraph or two proclaiming the wedding of my hero and his soon to be murdered lady friend. Then type “The End” and collect my validation icon from the NaNo site.

I won’t really kill her. I like her too much; in fact, we’ve been living together for much of the month. What comes next? No idea, really. I’ll write a retrospective of the entire NaNo process and post it in my journal and perhaps on some of the creative forums, if only to generate some (hopefully) useful discussion about these things–Julia Cameron’s “morning papers” is a similar exercise to NaNo. Then I’ll look over the batch of words I’ve produced and decide what to do with them. There are some good things in there, so I won’t just toss the baby out with the water. I’ll start cleaning it up, divide things into conventional chapters and finish the flashback portion. I’ll spent a little time thinking about future plot directions–if any actually exist–although I might just discard the whole idea for now. It just depends. But the kicker is, you see, that I developed this elaborate outline and used the two or three paragraphs then wrote an entirely different story. Well, it’s not really a story yet; perhaps a fragment of a fragment would be a more descriptive phrase.