Tiger's NaNo '09 - COMPLETE!

[Tiger]

Yay, this time of year again! I get to do more writing than ever before, and get to post in this thread like it's a diary XD

So. This year, I'm planning to write the novel I originally planned to write last year, before MW took over my creative output about halfway through October. Hopefully, I'll be able to resummon the creative fervor I had toward the story at the time.

And like last year, I have the unfinished previous NaNo novel hanging over my shoulder =P I neglected it some to finish up '07's novel, as well as a novel that's been sitting around for about four years..._{and still needs a new ending}.

Simultaneously, I'll be working ocasionally (maybe?) on chapters for my writing club's second collaborative novel. Multitasking, hurrah!

So. Let the madness begin! Good luck, everyone =)

SPOILER: Click to show

D- Main character one, male. Somewhat angsty due to a fight with his former best friend. He has two scars near his right eye, and likes history.

B- Main character two, female. A lot more...easy-going than D, and tries to pull him out of his angsty funk. Without much success, 'cause D doesn't really believe in friendship anymore. She has a mutation not entirely unheard of among her species. Yay!

K- Main villain one, male. A writer reluctantly forced into guarding the archives D and B will be going after. Between rescribing all the old books within the archives, and constant battle training, K doesn't have much time for writing anymore. I think in the future, he's going to make many of his decisions based on his first character, P.

S- Villain two, male. He may also be referred to in early posts as T, because I was originally going to add a semi-silent T to his name. Anyways. S dwells on the edge of insanity, and rather likes it there. He guards the archives as well, but with much more fervor than K. He likes killing. K hates his guts.

A- "Minor" villain (as in, he doesn't see much action), male. A is the leader of the guardians of the archives. He issues orders for K and S to go "take care" of B and D. K doesn't like him, either, because it was A's idea to throw K into battle training, thus eliminating K's writing time.

There. That should help these cryptic posts a tad ^^

[Tashni]

Ah, multitasking. The bane of all who can't seem to finish just one writing project at a time. I STILL want to rewrite '07's novel, because I LOVED where I ended up taking it, but the beginning is horrible.

In '06, I wrote a crummy novel. In '08 I rewrote it, but the file has been lost. As in, somewhere along the line, I (or someone in my family) must have deleted the WHOLE novel. *sobs*

Sorry, this is your thread. ^_^ BUT I FEEL YOUR PAIN!

[Tiger]

XD Not a problem, Tasni =) And I'm glad to know I'm not the only one who has those darn things sitting on back burners for so long!

And that stinks about your novel =( I'd be devistated if that happened to me.

[Tiger]

October 5th

I figured now was as good a time as any to start getting back into the story. Unfortunately, I got most of my enthusiasm for the project out when I wrote the plot summary and worked with characters and such last year...so I was bored out of my mind when I tried to reread the plot summary.

I ended up writing some expository, non-wordcounting bits with each character. Er, that was the intention, anyways, B (MC2) ended up not getting any prose, because as I finished D's...I got this sudden, really clear vision of a third character, K, and wrote a little scene for him instead.

I dunno what K's importance in this story's gonna be; he's a bad guy, at least for the moment, and he seems to be wanting to have sections of his own viewpoint in the novel itself. Well...that did the trick =) I'm interested in this project again.

[Tiger]

October 17th, 2009

Well...I've been attempting to work on characters and some plot for this, but I seem to always end up writing stuff for a completely different story. I think I'm just not going to get very "into" this year's NaNo until I start writing it.

That said, I did make a little progress with D, who's personality was really irking me. A song that really didn't have anything at all to do with the story somehow got me on a train of thought that gave me a better idea, so now I'm going at his history and feelings and such from a slightly different angle, and I think I like the concept better now....and I get the feeling it's what I should have gone with initially. Ah, well.

[Tiger]

October 21st, 2009

So! K is a writer! And he has pain in his hands, sorta like me, except I don't think I'm going to be that mean and give him carpal tunnel, too. And he likes music...so he's like me, really, except that he's got a really, really big "disability" (er...it's a genetic issue, but not a disease. He just looks really different from the rest of his species), and was shanghaied into a not-so-pleasant situation.

It looks like he gets to travel with S/T, a semi-psychotic assassin =D Fun times ahead!

EDIT: Added a "character acronyms" section to the first post. If anyone's reading this (XD) I imagine all the single-letter names are pretty much meaningless.

...And hey! As a bonus, you get to infer the novel's plot =D

[Tiger]

((I've decided I'll update these things every week, instead of slapping on a new post every day. Means if you want to see my daily wordcount, you'll need to check here. Or, probably, my diary XD))

Nov. 1st - 1,989 words
Music: "Prologue"- The Lady in the Water, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire
Well, this was exciting. Because I'm having a writing club meeting today at twelve, I felt uber-pressured to get to my 1,667 words quickly, so I would still have time to clean the house, get ready for people's arrival, etc. Ended up cranking out closer to 2,000 words, which was nice =) Liking the characters, actually, though I'm not enjoying redescribing things I've described for maybe four or five books now...

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Nov. 2nd- 3,738 words
Music "Desert Suite"- Terminator 2:Judgement Day
Eh. Finished up the "two years in the past" segment, but I did so very sloppily. I get the feeling I really started this off the wrong way. But I think I have a way to fix it without completely restarting the whole thing. I need to lob off my last couple paragraphs, end B's viewpoint section better, give a birthday to a different character, and stick with his perspective for a little while. And I have a two hour period where I can write tomorrow =P And hopefully, have the inspiration of a delicious strawberry parfait ^^

Also, I decided yesterday that S is officially sociopathic, which actually means he's going to be a very different kind of villain than I usually write. And I found out yesterday, the US medical system is no less euphamistic than anyone else. They call sociopathy "Antisocial Personality Disorder". Yeah. It's something like that...

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Nov. 3rd- 5,080 words
Music: "Suds on the Roof", "Brooks Was Here" - The Shawshank Redemption, "Desert Suite"- Terminator 2: Judgement Day
I feel very accomplished today ^^ During my two hour break, where I did indeed have a strawberry yogurt parfait, I was able to fix the issues with the beginning, and get a good deal done on my next 1,6667 word chunk.

I actually had a ton of work to do tonight, and ended up not being able to transcribe and continue until about an hour and a half ago. I'm very proud that I was able to make quota in that time ^^

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Nov. 4th- 6887 words
Music: "Aladar and Neera", "The End of Our Island" - Dinosaur
Wrapped up an awkward socialization scene. Tossed in a random fight. And a random, creepy act by S, though D and B don't know that yet.

Hoping to end this chapter tomorrow...

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Nov. 5th- 8,239 words
Music: "The Maze", "The Black Lake" - Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, "The Cave", "It Comes With a Pool" - Dinosaur
You don't see that this was posted on the morning of the 6th...*Jedi hand motions*

So. I actually did finish up the first chapter yesterday ^^

Discovered a new family relationship. And while describing to a friend the incredibly random, vaguely creepy event I threw in to get the story moving, I got an "...0.o". And she never uses that face, haha!

I'm going to try to get ahead on this today, since the past week's been a nightmare @.@ But with all the other stuff I have to do, we'll see how well that goes. I get to start K's part today =D

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Nov. 7th- 12,420 words
...So, Tiger learned today that writing your NaNo by hand while in a car being driven down the highway is not the best idea for your stomach's comfort. My handwriting was surprisingly neat, though.

Got K's backstory introduced today. I was surprised I made quota, without having to add on extra material. Yay!

New post tomorrow XD Finally, I can get this thing off page three!

[Tiger]

...On second thought, maybe I'll post here more frequently. Seeing as I'm not posting every day, anyways...*shrug*

Drama between the main MCs today. Uhm...I think it's going to influence an uber-important plot event I'd already planned on doing. I was going to go about it another way, but...well, that other way really isn't panning out, considering D's personality.

...And it occurs to me that paragraph is a cryptic jumble. Ah, well.

Wordcout: 15,203 (I'd like to write more later, if I can.)

[Tiger]

November 13th =D Oh, sweet! Friday the 13th!

Wow, today was rough! I had to use Write or Die tonight, my first time this year. It worked pretty well, which's a relief- 803 words in 24 minutes.

I actually have been steadily keeping at my word count the past couple days...I've just been too lazy too busy writing to do something as frivilous as logging in and updating my profile =P

Story itself is going well. I wrote a...well, the writing for the scene itself wasn't so great, but the scene itself was important, and plot-wise, worked out the way I needed it to. Prose needs a serious overhaul, but hey. It's there. And I've now finished Chapter 3, so apparently, we aren't going to have MW-like issues this year.

Well, not in that department, anyways.

[Tiger]

November 15th

Still hitting my deadlines. Wrote about 500 words in sixteen minutes, with Write or Die. I was hoping to get about a thousand in the twenty minutes before my friends arrived, but I was pretty happy with what I got, too XD

And, since I broke the 25K barrier today- I'm now halfway through my 50,000 words! =D I'm not anywhere near halfway done with the plot, of course, but that's okay! Just means I'll probably still be working on it come next NaNo XD

[Tiger]

November 19th, 2009

Passed 30K. Whoot! And tonight I'm actually working a little farther ahead, since I finally got a chance to work with K again.

Lots of bickering between D and B, and lots of cynicism from K. Admitedly, K has earned that right.

Writing is very tough this year. Definitely my constant time-crunching is a problem; thank goodness for spiral notebooks, which can go everywhere, and the fact that handwriting takes a lot longer to wear out my hand than typing does. But...I think I'm not really enjoying this novel as much as the others I've written. I could honestly say the past two years, "I love this novel!" (referring, of course, to the general idea of it, and the non-gagging parts). This one...eh. I'm a little more apathetic toward it. Maybe because it sat around for so long before I got back to it. Maybe because I just don't feel as much connection to this one, since one of the main characters, and to an extent, the plot, were derrived from emotions I don't really feel as strongly now.

And not helping matters any is me wanting to work on MW >.< I watched a movie and obtained a soundtrack that both inspire the story's mood. Agh.

[Tiger]

November 23rd

Holy cow, I actually got way ahead today! I had a ridiculously unprecedented amount of time to work on the story today, and I'm working pretty much exclusively with K at the moment, who's really my only favorite character right now.

I've started listening to Dean Koontz while driving; I have about two hours of commute every day, so that's a lot of really, really cool Koontz prose I'm listening to =) Add the fact that the story I'm listening to now (Intensity) involves a "sociopath" (not really a sociopath, but hey...) and it's pretty inspiring XD

[Tiger]

November 24th

And the continuity issues struck today. Two characters should be expecting a river they aren't expecting, because I didn't have the foresight to give them the foresight to look ahead at their stupid map.

And three characters should have been sitting in darkness while two conducted a sort of autopsy (though technically, only one was autopsying. The other was watching, and the third was hiding behind bookshelves). I forgot to have them turn lights on. Which isn't really the end of the world, but was sort of the prelude to these other issues.

Oh well. You don't write a novel like this without some editing involved. Least the developments are interesting- K keeps being awesome =D

[Tiger]

I did it again.

I won.

^^ And this was the year I wasn't really sure about, either, since this's officially been the busiest year...well, quite possibly ever, but definitely since I started NaNoing three years ago.

I don't know what's going to happen with this story next...not in terms of plot, but in terms of my writing it. I really have not enjoyed this story as much as my others, except for the pars where I get to work with K and S. My two main characters...I dunno. We're just not connecting, I guess. Maybe when I get to the point where D become somewhat sympathetic...

I suppose we'll see. And while I'm a little disappointed the 50,000 words I picked to write were a story I didn't entirely enjoy...I'm really happy to have done it =)

TO THE KITCHEN, FOR CELEBRATORY CHEESECAKE!!

[Stephanie (swordlilly)]

Congrats!