July Novel Writing Month

WriMos, or "Writing Months." That host of spin-offs from the original National Novel Writing Month that are used to light the fire under one's creative, writer butt.

Yup, and this summer I've taken part in JulNoWriMo.

After participating in NaNoWriMo in 2009, I didn't exactly feel like waiting an entire year just to get another 3k+ manuscript done. '09 was a screaming success story for me, but it begged the question, would spin-off WriMos have the same spirit as the original Nano? So what the heck, I decided to give it a shot and here I am at Day 9 with just over 19,200 words.

For NaNoWriMo I wrote Electrostatic Fantasy and for JulNo I am writing Arkanos (which E.F. is actually the sequel to :P). I decided I wanted to finally finish Arky after having it collect dust for over a year. And anyone might have guessed I'd run into troubles. Only thing is I didn't guess what kinds.

I had to split the manuscript in half. Yup, sliced right down the middle. Because I suspect that the whole thing might even reach 150k word count, three times the amount of single-story prose I've written in my life. Then I had to spawn over forty new characters (mainly minor ones) as well as replace a major character with another. Although I half expected to need character hire. But then the plot holes. It gave me a jump because I'd been utterly convinced my plot was tight-knit and perfectly configured and aligned. But when JulNo began I found my ancient plot line perhaps deservedly moth-eaten to the point of fish-netting.

After 17k was passed, my laziness in prep caught up with me and I came to a dead-end. Four days of next-to-no production. And why? The text was so boring! What on earth was happening? I was dying at the hands of my own creation. But the story was riveting, I knew it...right?

What did my problem turn out to be? I'd added a "prologue" which showed events a week or two before the "actual" story started, but I had failed to decide whether to treat it as an actual part of the story or a cute "extra." It's like trying to build a house on quicksand.

So now I've re-started Arkanos Pt.I-Memorycatcher for the third time over (I would've had to do that anyway with the way things were going) and I think I'm finally getting somewhere. Now the "prologue" is actually the beginning of the story, and my characters are liking it :)

Hopefully I won't find any equally-giant problems anymore so that I can finish before July ends. Not exactly guaranteed that, but I'd at least like it if I didn't have to start over from the beginning anymore.