Plastic Lions & Fantastic Phantoms

So that's my rent paid up, soon-to-be-ex-housemate's rude comment ignored and my Mum sorted for coming up to help me finish organising and shifting stuff on Sunday and Monday. Now I just need to get something nice for dinner and crank out 11,000 words at some point over the next 30 hours.


Crikey, it suddenly feels like an awful lot of words.

Title: The Carnival is Over
Word Count: 2421
Rating: PG
Original/Fandom: Original
Pairings (if applicable): Steven and Nell friendship
Warnings (Non-Con/Dub-Con/etc): none
Excerpt or Link to:

Extract taken from between this extract and this extract

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Title: The Carnival is Over
Rating: PG
Original/Fandom: Original
Word Count: 2173
Pairings (if any): Nell/Michael
Warnings (Non-Con/Dub-Con/etc): none
Summary: Nell and Michael, the morning after going to the pub after leaving the folk club and ending up in bed together.

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An extract from "The Carnival is Over" at precisely the point where I decided to go ahead with linking Nell to Erica, the female flyer from my previous Nanowrimo novel. I remembered I needed to get an extract up from a mandatory check-in challenge over at writerverse.

This is taken from a much longer day in the novel (a day I am still writing) but the section here is relatively self contained.

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In tonight's writing I've made (or revealed that) my main character Nell is the daughter of the main character(s) of my nanowrimo novel last year. I had been considering this for a while and I suppose that's why I left Nell's background vague this time round. It means a bit of jumbling round of dates in what I've written so far but that isn't really a problem. I just have to remember that Nell is 23ish in 1964 rather than 18/19ish. She herself was quite self-concious of acting like a teacher towards her housemate/bandmate Steven's 18 year old pregnant Scottish girlfriend so Nell actually being several years older is not out of the question.

I am amused by how Nell's back story (which wavers between vaguely and more specifically connected to the other novel's characters) has just completely ploughed straight through the middle of the scene I was intending to write. I've both excused it and steered back to the actual scene by saying that the three of them have been deep in thought while drinking tea and chomping biscuits. Adding this aspect to Nell's back story also helps shape her views on adoption a lot more three dimensionally. She knows that it can be a good thing because she's had a settled life with her 'Auntie' Lydia but she has also been left with a lot of questions about her parents. Nell is worried that Steven is going to end up marrying too young (he's probably about 19 or 20) but she can't bear to think of him, his girlfriend, Mary Anne, and their child spending the rest of their lives being tortured with questions similar to those she had growing up.

I'm definitely looking forward to seeing how this aspect of Nell's character and the novel develops, though I'm also curious about how it will affect my perceptions of last year's novel when I pick it up again to finish the first draft. I love the surprises and challenges that nanowrimo writing throws my way. :-)

I seem to be back on track with Nanowrimo writing now. On Thursday I got 2100 words done and in a writing session concluded just now I wrote about 800 words in the hour just before midnight and 600 more words in the 50 minutes that have passed since midnight.

Tonight's writing has dealt with the Malcolm Green scene that I included in one of my extracts. I now have a beginning to the scene and then I've got a conversation between the band (mostly an argument between Nell and a band member called Steven, which from Nell's thoughts and reactions seems to happen on a regular basis) after Malcolm has stalked off leaving them all in a bit of a tizz about what this actually means for them.

On the whole I'm really enjoying it right now. :-)

1742 words. :-)

863 words at the cafe during the write-in and the rest at home tonight. Don't ask me how I managed it because I'm not entirely sure myself. I had about an hour's faffing about not knowing what to write before both bouts of writing.

The story is another go at the one I tried to write for my first nano. It's gone from third person in the old version to first in the version and from being past tense to at least partly in present tense. The opening scene(s) that I wrote today take place after the point that in my vague plan was the end of the story.

Roll on day 2 (but after some sleep because I'm knackered!)

I am looking forward to seeing November out and coming into December. I'm carrying on with this first disconnected and discombobulated draft of my novel until I reach 50 000 words but my realistic view of this is to aim to get there before the end of December. And even then I want to have better handle on plot matters and take a break from it before I tackle rewrites.

There are also other things (shock horror!) to do in December. I want, nay need, to direct the obsessive and motivated spirit I've felt during nano into finding myself a job. I want to throw myself into more research for my novel, research that I can again pick up and expand on during continuation, edits and rewrites next year. I want to tidy my room, hoover the stairs, blitz the bathroom and clean the kitchen before my mother comes up to stay at the weekend.

I also want to get myself back into reading for fun. Yes, the research I've had time for this month has been fun but I think most will understand that I mean specifically novels. The problem with me is that I'll want to read a dozen different novels at once and find it difficult to stick with the book I'm on and see them through to the end when I'm in a particularly down state of mind. It's understandable then that I've fallen out of reading during my uni struggles.

What I want to do for myself in December is to get myself reading and focus on finishing the book in a decent amount of time before I drift onto the next. I'm giving myself a five book limit for the list of books I want to read and get through them before I let my mind wander over to others.

Here's my list, with the three WWII related books first, though this is not necessarily the order I'll end up reading them:

- Spitfire Girl by Lily Baxter
- Muddy Boots and Silk Stockings by Julia Stoneham
- A Game with Sharpened Knives by Neil Belton
+ this one is about Schrodinger in Ireland during the war. You may just about be able to picture my excitement when I spotted this on the charity shop shelf!
- Dracula by Bram Stoker
+ I've listened to the abridged audiobook (on cassette tape, no less) countless times and stayed in Whitby a good deal of times too but I've never yet got myself round to reading the full book
- Sophie's World by Jostein Gaarder

I've solved my title problem for the time being by taking one of the thousands of titles shared on the nanowrimo forums.

My story's title is now:
Circumnavigate Infinity

I'm starting to get a better hold on some sort of plot, though it may turn out that what I've been writing this month is a smaller slice of the whole story than I expected. It was already alongside the Greek Myths stuff, which was supposedly being narrated by my main character. It's possible that I may have a third section on my hands that is more science fiction, though again possibly a science fiction story written by my narrator. I don't know.

Talking of my main character, she's carrying off a romance with someone she wasn't supposed to be interested in or even particularly like. Maybe I should have expected that. I did have the idea that he was interested in her but now it definitely seems to be a mutual and genuine attraction. And yet she's still marrying her fiance for some reason.

I was actually quite shocked at how tense things have become between her and her fiance. I really liked the first scene idea I had with the two of them - meeting in a cafe and swapping postcards before they even talk talk to each other. So the question I'm asking myself at the moment is how do they go from love at first write to a long term romance and engagement to wanting to get married to growing frustrated and resentful to her falling in love with a German army captain to them (possibly) getting married after all. And then there's beyond that point, because there definitely is a beyond.

Daedalus, father of Icarus, presented his son with his greatest invention: a set of wings constructed painstakingly from the fallen feathers of the birds in the skies over Crete by day and sealed to the wood and copper frame with the wax of the candles that lit the workshop by night. Daedalus gave his son freedom in the form of flight. His breath caught as Icarus bravely stepped forth, up the steps to the window.

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