Cycles

Someone asked me why my final blog post for NaNoWriMo was just moving on to the future like that, and why I never really stopped to reflect on how great this November was.

Hey, November has been my favorite month for the last five years, ever since I discovered this program. And I still get just as much out of it as everyone else does. Unfortunately, since I know I can't make it to a "Thank God It's Over" party, I haven't really had any encouragement to express my excitement. I guess that's always how it's been--halfway into December people go, "Oh hey did you ever finish that novel?" (Besides, I'm already being flooded by everyone else's long reactions to the month, and I don't want to be repetitive!)

It's more than that, though, I think. It has to do with my personal thoughts about progress and accomplishment. Yes, this is probably going to get a little philosophical, but hear me out.

What's just happened is kind of like a vacation. When you go on vacation, everything else in life is kind of put on hold for a bit, as best you can manage. But it's not gone. It's waiting for you as soon as you get home, and it might even be a bit tougher while you catch up to things!

Or you could compare it to getting your dream job. When that happens, you certainly feel triumphant, and you celebrate. Then after that, it's time to actually go to work. You're excited, you get a good feel for it, and then, if it really is your dream job, you probably set out to have some kind of success at it, right? You have a new goal, and you move on to it, but it builds on your last goal that you accomplished.

For me, finishing NaNoWriMo is both of these things. It's both a return to normal life from something really enjoyable, and something to celebrate in its own right, but ultimately I have to move on to the next goal beyond that. Does that mean I'll never be satisfied? Maybe. But I feel like everything I do is building up to something really amazing. One day it's going to add up to an amazing collection of books. And that's a goal worth striving for.

Endings, 2012

Well, NaNoWriMo is over. Whatever your "done" is, you're done. In a few moments it will be December in the vast majority of time zones, including the one I'm living in. (If you live somewhere that still gives you a little time, come back and read this later!)

That means it's finally okay to look ahead, and that's exactly what I'm doing. I have my writing life pretty much mapped out for the next several months, so here we go.

Starting tomorrow I'm going back to rewriting The Third Face. This time, though, I have a (working) plan for it, chapter by chapter. My goal is to write one every day, and since the plan has around 43 chapters (though I may deviate from it a tiny bit) it ought to be done in the middle of January.

After that, I'm going to start looking back into some marketing things. I'll also try and get some kind of art contest going for the new cover. This will also be some time to plan the other two books in the trilogy as fully as I've done for this one. That should keep me busy for a while, and then I'll be editing and promoting, leading up to the book's re-release on April 5th--the same day the original came out.

Even at that point I'll already be back to writing like crazy, though. That's because Script Frenzy is in April*, and though I've only tried it once, and failed (back in 2010), I'm going to do it this time without fail! The script I have planned is "adapt The Third Face into an anime," so we'll see how that goes! And as soon as I'm done with that, it'll be back to novels for the second book, The Demon's Guardian, which should hopefully be done, in draft form at least, in the following three months. Finally, in August 2013 it's off to Camp NaNoWriMo for the crazy crossover I mentioned a couple of posts ago!

The ideal scenario is that I get The Demon's Guardian published by this time next year. Optimistic? Maybe. I'll be a bit more sure of myself once I see if my schedule for The Third Face works out as well as I'd like!

What are your plans for December and beyond?

*EDIT: I just found out that the official Script Frenzy was shut down due to lack of funds. That's really sad! But I'm still going to do it anyway.

Winding Down

I know a lot of my readers here are NaNoWriMo participants, so this one's for you.

The last couple of days are where things get a little bit crazy. Many people are already finished, but the vast majority of people are still scrambling to get done. You don't hear as much from the latter, though, because they're too busy trying to write! So those of us who have finished early are the only ones here to give advice to the people who aren't done, even though we aren't experiencing the same thing.

Yesterday I considered making a blog entry about my plans for after November, plans which I've actually already gotten started on just a little. But I didn't do it, because if you're not done with NaNoWriMo yet then thinking about life after November is the last thing you need to do. (By done, it may mean getting to 50,000 or finishing your novel or just writing all the way up to the end. At this point you ought to be able to tell what done looks like for you, and it doesn't have to be the same as anyone else's!)

When you get close to the end it's easy to fall into. You think, "Finally! I'm almost done! Soon I'll be able to do all the things I've been putting off, reward myself, and everything!" This is the point where NaNoWriMo is actually harder for people who do a lot of writing, because we can't help but think about the next project. But I think everyone kind of has that thing that they want to do once they finish and open up a large block of free time.

But if you're not done, as I mentioned above, then that free time isn't open yet. And I guarantee once you get that time, you'll have plenty of chances to relax and have all of those thoughts. The key to finishing now is to live in the moment. The memes don't say "December is coming," because that's not what's happening. You are in one of the last days in November, and that's just how it is. Nothing can happen after that unless you do your best right now.

Good luck to everyone playing catch-up, especially my buddy Duth Olec, who's racing to get 10,000 words out of the last couple of days here!

Reverse Cliffhanger Ending

This time, it's the author that's worried about what will happen next!

Well, the good news is that I finished NaNoWriMo 2012, claiming it as my fifth completion. The climactic clash went down without a hitch and my characters found themselves at a happy ending.

The problem? In doing so I accidentally left some very clear hooks for two sequels. Completely separate, distinct ones going in totally different directions. The ending pretty much calls for them in such a way that if people read this novel and I then said there weren't going to be those sequels, they'd be disappointed and possibly mad at me.

One is pretty simple. In the course of the novel, a baby is born. This baby, Oliver, is apparently the center of all of the conflict in the Bridge of Time, because removing him from time will supposedly have a large effect on the future of his world. I haven't ever mentioned how exactly, so this leaves his entire life open with a promise that it will be interesting.

Meanwhile, and much more alarmingly, a couple residents of the other timeline end up falling below the Bridge, and end up in an area I invented a while back for another novel. It's called the Paradox Slip, and it's home to everything that's ever been erased from a universe, whether that's because of time traveling matters or because I, the author, got rid of it. In fact, the place they land in is a setting that I scrapped from a story back when I was like 12 because then I already knew it was stupid.

It follows, then, that every character and story that I've ever chosen not to use or bring back, and everything that fell victim to the time travel trap (which is a surprisingly large amount of stuff in my writing!) is going to be there. This includes a villain in another novel who the heroes were only able to defeat by preventing him from ever being born, and so he's naturally taken control of this world. What I've got on my hands, in effect, is a crossover between everything I have ever written. Ever.

You can see that I'm just a little bit afraid here.

Climactic Clash: An Excerpt

The main reason it's been most of a week since I posted here is because I've been hard at work trying to juggle homework with this novel! I'm so close to being done that I can taste it, but that only slows me down, I think.

Anyway, since I'm too busy writing it to say much else, have an excerpt from the final battle. This should be just enough to leave you completely confused! (But then again, what else do you expect from a NaNo novel?)

The corpse of Anise Black rushed forward across the Bridge of Time and slammed into Ed, knocking him to the ground and causing him to drop Das Ende.
He shot her several more times, point blank, until he was out of ammunition. Then, as Eibmoz had, she disintegrated.
Ed looked up to see the blade of a sword pointed at him.
“You killed Anise,” said Aaron.
“Yes. Why do you care? Run along back to your world. She's still alive there.”
“You really are stupid, aren't you, Doctor? Here, let me make it clear for you!”
With that, Aaron yelled and came down with his blade, chopping off Ed's left hand. The pistol fell down into the abyss.
Ed rolled the other way and got up. “How did you get such strength so quickly?”
“It's me, stupid! I came up with this plan! I wanted to get close to you instead of him, so I could finish you personally! And I wanted to see Anise up close one last time before it all fell apart!”
“Oh. Doomy. Didn't expect it to be you. Right then. Just one question before we fight.”
“What?”
“What did you do with Oliver?” 

The Bridge of Time

The thing about NaNo novels is that they change.

Like, one year my novel about a prince who dreamed up the entire real world turned into a dark adventure featuring a memory-eating tower and a collection of souls in jars. Another year, it started out with a homeless guy fighting to retain ownership of his hat, and ended up as a vast, deadly game between two gods on a bet.

This one has already changed before. Let's recap: originally this was supposed to be about a depressed guy doing crazy and stupid things due to a Homestuck obsession. Then the depressed guy started getting therapy and help, and the novel was supposed to be about him becoming a better man.

It turns out that I am just naturally required to take it up a notch. And thus, what I have today.

Shortly after making Aaron attempt suicide, and seeing the consequences, I decided I wasn't too happy with them. I began an alternate scenario where he decides not to jump. Instead he murders Anise, who is oddly forgiving to him about that fate. I named this section "Timeline B" for convenience.

Then I dabbled in "Timeline A" again. Yes, apparently, I can't let go of either of them. That only leads me to one conclusion: I have to form a connection between them. Thus, I recently wrote a scene previewing the construction of this mysterious Bridge of Time, which will be used for just that purpose. The interesting thing, which I have not yet revealed, is exactly who is building said bridge...

The end is near. I'm hoping to hit 40,000 words tonight, and once I do, it'll be indisputably time to accelerate into the ending zone. I like the ending zone.

The Value of Foil

Here's one for the writers. Now I know what you must be thinking. I'm not talking about aluminum foil. I'm not talking about the old math technique. I'm not even talking about foiling an evil villain's plans. I'm talking about a character.

A foil is someone who's the exact opposite of your main character, personality-wise. It sounds simple enough. But most people roll that in with their antagonist, and it doesn't work that way. The main thing about the foil is that they have no idea that the things they're doing might actually be bothering the main character. The way this person acts just happens to highlight the main character's weaknesses and insecurities (at least within the story--you, the author, should be very intentional about it!)

If you're doing NaNoWriMo, you probably already have a foil in your story and don't even know it. In fact, this is probably one of the biggest things writers tend to do without even thinking about it. And that's great! But if you realize why you have that there, you can make it that much stronger. Not only that, but some people don't have it at all.

My novel didn't have a foil for about 20,000 words.

That's probably why the vast majority of those words were just internal monologue! My character was literally just sitting around, doing nothing except feeling sorry for himself and occasionally talking to a few girls and let them walk all over him. Sure. Great. There's his life. Could happen to anybody. Who wants to read that?

It doesn't become interesting at all until you see Ed Morse, picking up women nonchalantly and practically incapable of frowning. The only thing that he has in common with Aaron is an inner madness that occasionally creeps up in both of them, but it sends them both in very different directions.

I've hardly had time to play with this dynamic here, but it's what put the spark in a dying novel. Think about your novel for a minute. Do you have a foil in place? Please comment--I'd love to see what you have to say.

Complete Direction Change

You know all that stuff about Homestuck and all that I said about what this novel is about, and where it's meant to go?

Well, that's all gone out the window. My original concept is gone. I realized a while ago that the "hilarity ensues" part was not happening, and it just took me until now to see that everything I was talking about actually wasn't going to be a big part of my novel. Sure, I talked about Homestuck at length, but Aaron's obsession with it only led to the way things are right now.

Naturally, once the breakup happened, Aaron was crushed. He took solace in the online adventures, but his desire to find a "moirail" (someone who calms you down when you're doing something crazy) led him to the idea of attempting suicide. Now he's jumped off a building and just about everything in his body is broken. Lovely!

So now he has a therapist, a really kooky guy named Ed Morse who embraces insanity and embodies confidence. (If you get the connection in that character, hats off to you.) This is where he becomes a role model for Aaron, and suddenly the older man is giving him tons of dating advice. Coincidentally, and unbeknownst to Aaron, Anise is also going to Ed for dating coaching!

The result of this, and the way Aaron grows up and becomes someone worth respecting, is the new future of this novel. Almost halfway in and I just now figured that out! He could still do something crazy and self-damaging again, but I doubt it. Looks like after 20,000 words I'm finally making this depressing  book into something positive. And that's just a good thing for everyone, now, isn't it?

Time Shenanigans

I went to another write-in tonight. At first it was quiet, and I typed silently along with everyone else. Then, a couple more people arrived, and suddenly we were all talking. Amazingly, I still got a day's work in, even though I felt like I spent more time there talking to everyone than anything else!

It's even more amazing because, for the first time, I hit a roadblock. Aaron is currently in a coma and neither his dreams nor the actions of anyone else are really that interesting--they're just filler right now. Of course that filler has gotten me up to 20,000 words already, so when I complained about my problems people looked at me funny. Oops! It sounds kind of arrogant that way, doesn't it?

Anyway, I wanted to stay longer, but I didn't have internet, and I really wanted to make sure my word count was updated before midnight. So I left at 11:00... and immediately got lost. Soon I was driving by a school I'd never heard of and through a residential area with no sign of where I was. I thought I'd never get home!

Then I had a sudden epiphany: I had my phone! I parked somewhere for a minute, pulled it out, and found to my relief that I had 3G. Quickly I rushed onto the NaNoWriMo site and updated my word count from there. Success! Oh and then I also looked up directions to get home.

Yup. I clearly have all my priorities straight.

First Milestone

In my last full-length post, I talked about how my experience and techniques helped me to increase my word count dramatically. In fact, I've consistently gone into half-hour chunks of time and come out with close to 1000 words--and now, on Day 3, I've already hit the 10,000 mark.

This is where I have to start to think about something. You see, according to the structure workshop I mentioned in an earlier post, my "first plot point" should be somewhere around the 20%-25% mark of the novel. Assuming I finish the novel in 50,000 words, that means it's roughly somewhere between now and about 12,500 words.

The "first plot point" is where you transition from illustrating the character's normal life to getting into the actual conflict and subject matter of the book. In fact, I spent this entire 10,000 words illustrating just how bad Aaron's life is, and why he's so depressed. Actually, I have to wrap that up pretty soon, because I want it to culminate in a low point. That's when he'll discover Homestuck, as I mentioned in my summary.

So what's the situation so far? Starting from a massive breakup (which draws heavily on my own experience), Aaron already feels pretty worthless. Worse, another girl that he thinks is interested in him turns out to already have a boyfriend, and when he asks her on a date they go as "just friends." This is awkward and reinforces the idea that nobody likes him that way.

That's when things get complicated. Aaron finds himself with Anise Black, a girl that's much too young for him, to the tune of 13 years old to his 17. Ouch. She's about as depressed as he is, and the two of them become close by reassuring each other and helping build one another's self esteem. This may seem like a good thing, but Anise is very interested in getting sexual, and Aaron is not.

Meanwhile, because of their age difference, their relationship is secret. In order to help cover it up, Aaron starts a "fake" relationship with Shelly, an old friend of his, who's in a similar situation. As you might suspect, he becomes closer to her than he planned, and Anise is extremely jealous. She gets angry, and in turn Aaron shares that problem with Shelly, since she's the only one who knows about Anise. Things are spiraling out of control, and in my next scene it's all going to come crashing down.

Expertise

The kickoff party last night was amazing! There was a lot of talking and sorting things out as midnight crept up, and we exchanged a lot of advice. The energy was high, probably due to the presence of LOTS of Halloween candy.

There was one thing that happened that felt strange to me, though. A new novelist came in and asked how many people were doing NaNoWriMo for the very first time. Of course, a couple of hands went up. Then people started sharing how many years they'd done it, and how many wins they had accumulated.

Confidently, I said that this year would be my fifth. Everyone stared. I might have been the youngest person there, but suddenly I commanded a strange respect, the quiet guy that hardly anyone had noticed before. People started asking me questions, like whether it got easier the more times you did it. I said no, it's always difficult. Which, in my experience, has always been true. You can't get through this without a fight. It was the most honest answer I could give. Or so I thought.

One other thing I did, which I feel is relevant: I confessed that this year would probably produce my worst novel yet. And I was okay with that.

As midnight approached, someone began to count the minutes. With thirty to go, I had my first sentence in my head and my fingers above the keyboard. I channeled my inner insanity: tilted my head, widened my eyes, and made a giant grin. My brain got the message.

 The instant I heard zero I was on the rampage that I had anticipated, my keyboard the machine gun, with no worries of running out of ammunition. Oh, and there's no doubt that I did indeed massacre that kickoff: after half an hour we stopped and compared word counts. I heard 250, 300, 500, 800. I didn't want to tell them mine, but I did. It was something like 1100 words.

I had spent that entire time recounting events from my own life, skimming them and deliberately leaving out the happy parts to leave a picture of a very depressed young man to begin with. I was sure it was the wild anticipation that had done it, but once again I channeled my crazy, and by 1AM my total word count was 2276. I managed yet another half hour just this evening, with similar results.

Who knows? Maybe I am really good at this now after all. Obviously part of it was my statement, my worst novel ever, which killed all quality control outright--something we're told to do time and time again. But I think just as important were the madness that drove me, and the method of listing things very specific and personal to me. I think everyone can do those things, at least. We're all a little crazy. Otherwise we wouldn't be doing this. And putting in a bit of yourself comes with the trade--it might be tough if your novel is really "out there," but you can always find a way.

Whew! Too bad this blog post isn't part of my novel--I spent another half-hour working on it. Ah, well, I'm off to do more of my absolutely insane writing--and you should, too!

BwaHAHAAHAHAHAAHAHAhahahahahahhahaaHAHAHAAAAAAAAAAAAA

New Beginnings

While I try not to let on in this blog--due to the fact that it's really not the subject of this blog to discuss such things--I've been in kind of a slump. There are reasons for that, and most are emotional, and rather personal, in nature. I won't get into it too much, but it slowed my writing to a crawl, nearly a halt.

The kicker was the other night when my primary computer shut off, permanently. I'll survive, but that kind of prevents the Halloween art I was going to post up here as a fun little thing. My characters were going to be in costume and it was going to be great. Ah, well. One of these days I'll upload it anyway, though the surprise will be ruined.

Anyway, back on subject here, today was kind of a turning point for me. Again, getting a little personal, but I'll just say that my to-do list is a heck of a lot shorter than it was yesterday. That helps a lot, because I was getting to where I just didn't think I could do it. I considered dropping out of NaNoWriMo for the first time in 5 years.

Pfft! What was I thinking. Back down now? On the very brink of what promises to be another insane, amazing, fun, silly, harrowing adventure of a month?! Now that I'm going it with a lot more friends than ever before?! When I already made plans to make it to the kickoff at midnight, despite working at 10 AM the next morning?!

I think not. No way. If there's one thing I know I'm capable of, and that's yet still a really impressive feat, it's finishing a NaNoWriMo. Where else am I going to get my confidence back? Also, because my character this year has a few shades of my inner self, it'll be therapeutic in that sense, too. Once I come out of my day-long coma December 1st, I should have my drive back in full force.

Awkward Romance

So, NaNoWriMo is coming up, and like many years I have a pretty bare-bones type of plan in mind for it. One that could go anywhere, has potential to be silly, and, most importantly, does not compel me to believe the resulting novel will actually do anything for my writing career. (This last condition is the trump card against my inner editor.)

The way it does this? By blurring the line between fan fiction (something based in another creator's work) and originality. My novel, tentatively titled "The Lifey Thing," is rooted in an intellectual property that is now not only a story but an entire culture. This culture, which can now be seen filling conventions everywhere, is where the main character resides.

Yes, like me, my character Aaron is a big fan of the hit hybrid-media webcomic Homestuck. Actually, he's a bigger fan. Instead of just buying some cards and throwing together a cheap Halloween costume to show his love for it, he discovers it and then immediately becomes obsessive. To the point where he starts taking all the quizzes out there to find what character role fits him, and then does everything he can to follow it.

Not only that, but he gets into things like "troll romance," in which love is divided into four quadrants that are symbolized by playing card suits. Hearts is pretty much what you expect, while diamonds and clubs are more or less platonic. It's spades that makes this really weird stuff. Spades represents the kismesis, a person you hate passionately but are somehow still very attracted to. Aaron believes that he'll only be satisfied if he can somehow get both a traditional romance (which he never had any success with in the first place) and a kismesis.

Needless to say, the people around him have no idea why he's acting the way he does. It makes no sense. He may throw away reason and the things that are best for him just to get into this. Is there even the slightest possibility that his extreme attitude would ever pay off? That's what I'm setting out to explore this November.

Ready for NaNoWriMo?

Oh, boy. This is going to be a tough month.

As you all already know, I've got college and work going on, and it's been a tough juggle. Trying to update this blog and make even a little bit of effort on The Third Face each day has been about all I could do.

So basically, when November rolls around, I will never have a spare minute.

If you're new to my blog and you don't know what NaNoWriMo is, back up a bit. Read this a sec. I'm trying to write a novel in a month here. Craziness by itself, but I've done it before. (You should too.) It was tough every time. I didn't have this kind of workload back then, though.

The problem is finding those spare hours, every day, and actually having the will to use them. It's about still wanting to work on something when I've already been at work all day. It's about still being able to type after doing homework for hours. It's about still having some energy after taking classes until 9 at night and driving home. Every. Single. Day. For 30 days.

Can I do it? We'll see. You'll definitely know whether I do or not. As usual, when I'm in the midst of something big like this I can't help but share what's going on with it through this blog. In fact, next time I'll tell you exactly what I have planned for this year.

Predicament

Out of all the fancy certificates and stuff that the National Novel Writing Month offers after the fact to winners, there's only one thing that I find to be useful at all. A special code to CreateSpace allows 5 free paperback copies of the winner's finished novel. Needless to say, I'm planning on taking advantage of it. Not for the novel that I wrote this year, but rather The Third Face.

The problem is that I still don't think I've revised The Third Face enough to even show 5 people. There are some pretty big problems with it, mainly the near-absent setting descriptions and the overwhelming rush through a seemingly disjointed plot. Its main villain just suddenly appears in the last few chapters without fanfare, and the conflict that set off the story is not resolved, but rather conveniently escaped by the heroes.

This would all be okay if I was still willing to revise it. But as things stand, I don't even like The Third Face that much anymore. After 5 drafts of overthinking everything, I'm just kind of sick of it. I contacted someone for help, then realized I couldn't even bring myself to write a simple outline to share because I didn't want to go back through my work anymore.

The code I got is good until June 30th of next year, so it's not like I'm in a huge hurry to get this done, but I also know that I take a very long time to get done with most tasks, and tend to just forget about them if I've been neglecting them for too long. That's not a good formula in this case at all. Okay, it's never a good formula. I should probably do something about that problem, but what? How can I approach this? It's hard to get started on anything in the face of the holiday season, and I just kind of feel stuck.

Oh Right

National Novel Writing Month ended a week ago. Before, I was constantly making blog posts about my writing, but after my lull in productivity in the novel, a similar lack of work went into this blog.

Unlike the blog, however, which has gone without a single post since then, my novel did pick back up, and I managed to finish it just in time to win! I was very excited, just as I have been each year before, and it felt great to let out the customary giant sigh of relief. There are few things more joyous than the finishing of another brand-new novel, and it never gets old, either.

After the euphoria stage came the relaxation, this idea that since the novel was finished, I could just sit back and do nothing. With no school or work, only projects that I choose to do are there to occupy me. Thus, I played video games and then spent three straight days with my girlfriend before finally coming back to reality last night.

It wasn't until a few minutes ago that I realized that, in addition to the things I had been catching up on (like steadily working out more pages for my Pokemon webcomic and uploading more gaming videos to my Youtube channel), I still had this blog to update. Naturally, I came right to it and began typing up an entry. Then I got distracted and it took another good hour to get it finished, and I still haven't gotten to any of the other things that I was about to do before I thought of this. Man, task management is hard.

Discouragement

Have you ever used the writing software at Pangurpad.com? It's a pretty cool system focused on making everything as simple as possible. It allows easy-access notes with categories for characters, places, and items, as well as branching timelines of events--but other than that, it's just a plain and simple screen to type on with the ability to save onto the site's cloud server. That means your entire work is kept online and you can access it from your account on any computer.

So then, explain to me this: how me clearing my browser data somehow totally deletes the file. It's a good thing I backed up my novel a couple of days before, because even the small amount I did lose, 4000 words, is pretty much the death sentence for my novel. After some creative copying and pasting I got back to where I was in terms of word count, and wrote a nice little speech about how angry I was. Five minutes later, when I came to continue what I was working on, it was gone once again.

I have no idea what the problem is, but I haven't got a single word on that page, and frankly, I don't have the time to look for more writing software. My rant even declared that I didn't want to go through with my plot anymore, and that's even more true now. I feel completely defeated right now. What am I supposed to do if I'm physically not being allowed to write? My plan was to just summarize the ending of the story and write a shorter one for the 9000 or so more words I have left. Now I haven't the faintest idea what to do. I'm certainly not going on right now, and my methods for finishing it just might not be 100% legitimate but at this point finishing at all (short of typing random nonsense) is a miracle.

The bottom line is, my text editor hates me.

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.

NaNoWriMo 2011: Objects

STRANGE-LOOKING HAT

Matt is the proud owner of this strange-looking hat, which has a special function so secret that nobody, not even the narrator, is allowed to know what it is until the appointed time.

It looks a lot like a black pirate hat. On the left side is some sort of golden satellite dish, while on the right is a colored feather that is the be changed every day of the week. However, since only a few hours have passed so far in the story, only the color for Thursday is known: purple.

DARK TOME

Natalia carried this black book closely with her for quite some time early on in the story.

She is sure that its contents are not meant for human eyes to see, and even if she wanted to look at it, there is in fact a lock on it which she doesn't have the key to.

Still, due to its apparent connection to Leth--perhaps on orders from him--she was very concerned with keeping it on her person at all times, right up until she failed to do so, which she lamented as a terrible mistake.

NaNoWriMo 2011: Places

SMELTON

Where Matt was going before running into Pat. Also where Natalia lives. It's a pretty big city, which is known to contain many stores packed next to busy streets, a towering library, and a very large supermarket called *sigh* All-Mart.

DARGUS

Matthew's hometown, right across the bridge from Smelton. He didn't have much luck there, and he's not planning on going back there. It might be important later, and it might never be mentioned again. Who knows?

NATALIA'S HOUSE

A big, lavish house, this is where Natalia spends most of her time. Its three floors haven't been fully explored yet.

The first floor contains her living room, which features a large TV, a couch, and a coffee table; her kitchen, which is furnished with new appliances and a minibar; and several other rooms, currently unexplored.

Upstairs is her bedroom, as well as her walk-in closet and a room set aside specifically for her to worry about her appearance. There's probably more up here too.

The basement is separated into storage and her ritual room, where she speaks with dark spirits on a daily basis.

MATT'S DREAMHOUSE

This place probably doesn't really exist, as it seems to be only an object of Matt's fantasies. It consists only of a bedroom and a bathroom, and is also furnished with a microwave in case he'd like to make ramen. It's heated for comfort, but doesn't have any other features at all.

He would also like it to be located somewhere that is near both a library and a laundromat, so he doesn't have to buy his own entertainment or appliances beyond the microwave

He figures if he makes only a small wish, life will give it to him.