Wednesday, October 20, 2010

Pink Lemon Hell (Or: The Horror of NaNoWriMo) Part 1

 (AN: This is NOT the topic that I was alluding to at the end of How To Play Video Games. This is a secondary weekly update pertaining to a 50,000 word novel that I plan to finish by November of 2010's end.)

    God bless this craft that I have allowed myself to be wedged in to. I enjoy writing, I enjoy reading, I enjoy getting inspired by how perfect and clever the work of other people came out to be after reading that I just lean back in quiet awe with a grin and say: "Wow..." It makes me optimistic to see that the human race can create something so wonderful despite horrible shortcomings.
  God damn this craft that I have allowed myself to be wedged in to. Yes, the above is true, but those aforementioned shortcomings? Yeah. Those get in the way. Bad. Especially if you lack the discipline to see that you have time to write, but you putz around on the Internet instead (like I am as I write this; damn you Doug Walker!).
  It is here where I decided that I need to do something about it, and that something is this: I need to force myself to sit down and write. Every day. No video games, no Twitter, no podcasts (unless I'm out and about), and ...decrease novel reading time, but not too much.
 So, to help with that, I decided to participate in NaNoWriMo. What is this (literally) alien sounding name? Here's an exert from Wikipedia: National Novel Writing Month (also known as NaNoWriMo) is an annual creative writing project coordinated by the non-profit organization The Office of Letters and Light. Spanning the month of November, the project challenges participants to write 50,000 words of a new novel in one month.
(Mur Lafferty introduced me to it by her podcasts! :D)
   The novel that I chose is a rewrite of the first story in a (below eight but above five part story arc) superhero concept of mine called: Pink Lemon. What is it? It's a story about a bubbly young woman named Lora Summers and her sardonic fraternal twin sister, Sarra, both gaining some gauntlets that grant them superpowers; the gauntlets themselves having formed several pairs of superheroes on Earth for many years, so it's like the Green Lantern Rings; they have mentors.
  Lora and Sarra find out what it's like to be sudden top notch super heroes with a reputation to keep, in a world where about sixty percent of the population has some sort of meta ability already, while dealing with a crazy witch named Morgan who seeks revenge on a supposedly nefarious warlock named Leon Donaldson and will do anything she can to achieve her goal, Morgan taking an interest in Lora's best friend and superhero in training, Cindy Richards to help complete her goal complicates the issues.
 Along the way, the world that they live in suffers from people not caring for the heroes anymore, since there is an over saturation of metas anyway, and the people in charge, those top notch heroes, face a crisis of having thier interest lost, and thus loose funding to help support the metas that can do inhuman acts, but not enough to be real heroes, and help them cope with their powers and nip supervillians in the bud.
  This summery will be at the start of every blog regarding Pink Lemon Hell since my readership on blogger is growing ever more. Don't worry though, the content will be different after the summery each time.
  What is this PLH blogger series about? I wanted to keep a public journal (thus, a blog?) documenting my progress to keep this goal up and actually sit down and write the story with a frightening deadline standing outside the window and approaching ever closer with a knife in it's hand. Whew!This is because, if I don't project expectations for myself and others around me, than I might as well never finish the book and keep watching The Nostalgia Critic and call it research (and I thought that video games inhibited my writing!).
  So, how's the PL story going right now? Well, I'm planning it out, making a summery and sweating bullets to find ways of legitimately padding it out to 50,000 words without looking gimmicky (roughly 245 pages on a 4 x 6 inch book at a 12 PT. font). This fucking terrifies me since previous drafts of the same story hit around 70 to 110 pages using the measurements in the lines above. God damn man's shortcomings!
  So, the question is, if the story is worked out, sorta, how do I complicate matters to make life hell for Lora and Sarra while making a good springboard into their new lives as heroes and at the same time, keeping story ideas separate from each other?
  Not to mention getting a 250ish page story done within a month while having a full time job with children that are not my own running around at home too. How to I do that?!
  ...Those are very two good questions...
  I'll conclude for now, and write a new entry on this topic next Wednesday. Over the weekend, I should have an entry about music in general and how it affects me and my writing as a whole.
  See you soon.

"You put an ounce in a bucket each day, you get a quart."
--JOHN McPHEE

No comments:

Post a Comment