Plot Transformation

As anyone who's read this blog over the last month can see, the novel I'm writing places an pretty heavy emphasis on the main character Matthew Lothyre and the mystery of his strange-looking hat. The first conflict besides Matt's poverty is early antagonist Pat's attempts to steal the hat.

An earlier discussion also mentioned that the semi-rich, occult-loving girl Natalia Derinde essentially took over the plot with her strange behaviors and her deep connection with the mysterious dark spirit Leth. But what I didn't realize was that it wasn't her that was making things interesting--it was Leth himself.

Suddenly, my book is about Leth and his sister Parla in their competition of influence over people of Earth. Whoever can get their followers to win in a series of arbitrary yet heated contests with virtually no rules will take complete control over some important matters in their otherworldly home. Matt and Natalia keep their importance as the main players on Leth's team as this battle, apparently taking place over many human generations, comes towards its climactic end.

Obviously this still leaves a lot for me to work on, since that's still not the most thrilling plot you can ask for. I mean, the stakes are completely vague, and... well, okay, basically a lot of things are just vague. But that's something for another draft.

I wasn't really considering taking this too far, but if I can reconstruct my plot from some of its scattered pieces after this is done, then I might just have a decent novel on my hands. Due to the large number of posts about it on this blog (and how many people have just started reading this because of a certain NaNoWriMo Facebook post!) I can't exactly back out of the project now. I've invested not only my own time in it, but also what I suspect to be a fair amount of interest from others.

It will be a ton of work to revise it into a presentable form, but it's not as if I don't have other things to do in the obligatory don't-even-look-at-it period. The blog you see before you will probably die down a bit after this month is over, but it won't go back to the barren state it was in for a long time beforehand.