Monday, November 2, 2009

The Process: NANO braindump

So I've started my Nano novel, I've regained contact with the web site and all that other good stuff. I realized while doing something else unrelated that I really like writting about the process of things. Not the things themselves but the process of how they come about. Ironically I am uninterested in listening to how processes come about but I do very much love observing them. Like watching Sasha get ready for drag. That is a multi hour process that spans time, locations, sometimes even days. Other times the whole thing becomes super compressed. I still like to watch it happen each and every time, from song selection, to outfit, to putting it together, to stage. It is fascinating.

I miss sasha. I'll prolly bring her up again later.

So the whole Nano thing. I've started a process. First I did an outline. Man am I ever using that term in the roughest sense possible. Basicly, it is just a way to help get me from point A to D without stalling out and if I do stall out then I have a back up list of emergency scenes I can fall back on and use.

I have a weird relationship with outlines though due to my years of GMing. If you were to look at the session notes, then look at what happened, you'd wonder why I wrote the damn notes in the first place. Reason being is that I set up anchor points. Things that must happen. Getting to the thing that must happen is one of those things I can just sort of do on the fly.

For example in my novel part of my outline says introduce hippy. So I mulled about on this problem while writting another scene and all the sudden the wierd vanishing christian girl shows up and all solutions are found. This would make more sense if you read what I've written so far. Otherwise just go with it. More over I noticed the shift in tone that I started using once he put the gun down and started to enjoy himself. It became less dark, and much more playful. This is something I want to start using for the rest of the novel. Not just the tone but style, vernacular, metaphores, I want the whole thing to feel diffrent as diffrent moods and charecters take over.

Link will either be light and airy, or dark, spikey, and morose
Sara will be that smooth cold evil. I will use a lot of the same imagry around her that I will use for the gun. Guns and butterflies.
Hippy will be soft, warm and will have a lot of natural stuff
Cowboy will make everything really weird and out of place like having the spagetti thing happening when he is around.

I could be working on it right now, but I realized that pounding away at it every waking moment is a quick violent way to achieve burn out. I won't be riding the minimum word count the entire way to victory, that is just cutting it to close. At the same time though I don't plan on running myself ragged right out of the gate.

Not so much as slow and stready, but I still have a great deal of brainwork to do.

OH hey yeah before I forget this is how the rest of his summer will go.

-meeting and then getting to know hippy
-talk of the dark side
-befriending squirrles
-meeting the lady in white (she is to cool not to put her in this story locals know who I am talking about)
-The secret sex club, along with the revelation of the dark side
-exit hippy
-Third Orientation. Meet Sara.

Then there is a narrative break where fall begins.

Okay I want to switch gears and write about NaNoWrMo proper so that will get its own post. Then I also wanted to do the month in review but I don't think I will have enough time.

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