Thursday 20 December 2012

Plankton are People Too

As it's been over a month since my last entry, I've decided to write another. For some reason, I haven't felt particularly ~bloggish~ these days. This is in spite of the fact that I'm now actually getting visitors after having put a link to this blog on my NaNoWriMo profile.

With that latter point in in mind, it probably isn't necessary to go into much detail about what NaNoWriMo is. But for those who don't know: one novel (read: first draft), 30 days, 50,000 words.

Before November, 50k words were far more than I'd ever written for a single piece, so naturally, I was a little apprehensive. In the end, though, I managed it with 50,902 words. My story is called “Muscle Memory”. Some previous working titles were “Plankton are People Too”, and “All Flesh is Arse,” a HILARIOUS!!! take on the Biblical phrase, “All flesh is grass”.

The nautilus, being (says Wikipedia) a megaplankter, is a person. And yes, I did only put this image here so it'd make the preview to this entry look better on my blogspot reading list.

Here's part of the synopsis, taken from my NaNoWriMo profile:

“Our hero, Karl Levy, has discovered that some sneaky bastards have somehow turned him into a robot. Join him on his journey as he deals with snobby executives and hallucinates about buses with teeth and people dancing badly to 80s pop songs.

Actually, ignore the bit where it says "join him on his journey" because this first draft is going to be crap and I probably won't show it to anyone.”

It turned out that “crap” was putting it kindly. There are plot holes that I didn't bother to fix, organizations acting in ways that a real organization would never act, and a few too many dream sequences which were fun to write but don't add much to the plot. The quality of writing is often downright atrocious; and if clichés are litter, then my story is a landfill. I do quite like a few of the characters, but unfortunately, the protagonist isn't one of them.

I'm still happy that I went through with it, though, even if the end result isn't great, because now I know that I can do it (going to the write-ins certainly helped). I don't know if I'll try making a second draft. They say that one ought to put a first draft away for a significant amount of time so that when one gets to reviewing and rewriting, they will do so with a less biased mind. Maybe I'll do that.

I'm thinking about my next piece of writing, which will probably be a short story. I have the beginnings of characters and a plot. This time around, I think I'll manage to avoid writing about things which I don't know anything about (a very long list).

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