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).