Editing The Ship of the Unremembered

I think tomorrow will be the first posting of new material from the book. I’ve started recutting sections and arranging them to where they make the most sense from a narrative point of view.

Unlike just about everything I’ve written and posted here before, this book is long enough to have a few different viewpoints represented, so keeping the chronology straight is more of a challenge than I’ve faced before. It’s a fun one though, and I learned a lot about my personal writing process in doing this book. I’m definitely doing another book next month. And I’m definitely pre-planning it this time.

For the Win

Yes, my 50,000 words are complete and my first successful Camp NaNoWriMo is behind me. My next is coming up soon though, I think I’m going to be crazy enough to do August as well.

Just because the challenge is over doesn’t mean the book is though. In the end, I had a LOT of writing to do really quickly. I wrote more than 11,000 words on the last day alone, and more than 6,000 the day before. In order to do all that writing that quickly, I worked on chunks of the book that I could spit out really fast, and wrote a lot of free-form brainstorms to keep the plot straight and make sure things made sense.

What I ended up with are lots of individual chapters that jump around crazily through time, which I need to put in their proper chronological order and then read over for flow and consistency, as well as write any gap-filler which may be needed (and it will be needed) to stitch the different pieces together as one.

Basically this means that for tonight, I’m a little bit brain dead and will not be posting a new chunk of the book. That can wait for tomorrow. For now, hooray! I’m done. Until August.

First Drafts are Tough

You may have heard of Emma Coats from the 22 Rules of Storytelling According to Pixar piece that’s floating around lately. She’s the storyboard artist who posted the 22 rules to her twitter account. She also posted the two I’ve embedded above. This additional rule is incredibly important to all NaNoWriMo/Camp NaNoWriMo participants, so I thought I’d share it as companion to the ones that are getting all the attention. I’ve written about this previously; first drafts are what I consider to be the true writer’s block.

Click to read more ...

The Avengers Need No Avenging

Joss Whedon is one of those guys who just makes everything so easy. I got back earlier this evening from seeing The Avengers, and man is it good. It has all the classic Whedonesque elements of action and humor, characters and story that make me such a fan of Buffy and Angel and Firefly.

It’s making me think I should brush up on more of Whedon’s shows and maybe some comics too; I try to keep an eye on my own weaknesses, and one area I’m especially worried about in my work right now is pacing. Whedon is great at pacing.

I kind of want to write a review of this film, but to analyze the story properly would require a whole ton of spoilers. Instead I’ll just leave it at this, a brief discussion of the inspiration it has given me for my writing. Maybe I’ll review the story in a few weeks, when spoilers aren’t such an issue.

A Big Ball of Wibbly-Wobbly, Timey-Wimey ... Stuff

I do love time travel stories, but writing them can be mentally exhausting. I have a set of outline notes on this story that’s getting entirely too complex, so I’m writing this today and will be spending a chunk of tomorrow straightening things out. Stay tuned!