NaNoWriMo Eve!

Alright, you guys, it's NaNoWriMo Eve. If I lived in Australia, I'd be furiously writing right now. But to be honest, when we reach 12am Eastern Time, I'll probably be asleep because November 1st also marks the official end of my vacation.

My novel this year will deal with a time-delayed murder and a possible ghost. It'll also be my first story set in Philadelphia.

While I should have been working on my outline for this coming month, I've been trying to get Awake edited (my Wrimo project from last year - only 2/3rds through it). I'd like to say it's going well, but I guess I'm having my doubts. Regardless, writing helps me escape other stuff, so I've already accomplished something very big for myself.

Keep an eye on the wordcount widget to your right and chart my progress. Feel free to cheer/laugh as needed.

Mind's Eye by Håkan Nesser

Now that I've stopped writing for a little while, I've got to read a few books.  So I went to my library, and ended up borrowing Mind's Eye by Hakan Nesser, who is, apparently, pretty popular in Sweden.  I thought, Good! I like European things, and the description of the story sounded interesting.

The mystery starts out really promising.  Guy wakes up and doesn't know what happened (quite like what I just wrote -- one reason I chose this book), and discovers his wife is dead.  Guy goes to prison, but he didn't do it -- and gets murdered himself (don't worry, this is all in the blurb, so I'm not giving anything important away).  

That's all good.  Interesting.  Okay, now what?

The investigators investigate.  They talk to people.  Halfway though, they're talking to people.  At the 3/4 point, they're talking to people.  At the end, they're talking to people.  

I don't know.  If you read on Amazon, it got really good reviews, but I didn't feel it.  It was sort of like the middle sagged all the way to the end, and all the questioning became really repetitive.  Very much a plot-driven story, since the characters didn't really have lives of their own (not as much as I like -- i.e. they didn't really do any extra-curricular activities that weren't mentioned as a side-note).

Nothing strikingly "wrong" with the story or the writing style, just not my cup of tea.

A new plot

Oi.  A new plot snuck up on me a few weeks ago, and it's developing really nicely.  However, I already have a nice, very detailed outline to work from in November.  Maybe the same thing will happen this year that happened last year: I'll finish my planned story 2 weeks in and then start on the new plot in the second half of the month.  Last year, I was unemployed, though ... this year, I'll probably be doing overtime.  Eh... it can't hurt to have too many plots, right?

It started as just a murder mystery, but a ghost story has sort of crept into it.  I've wanted to do a ghost story for a while (especially dealing with spirit photography), but couldn't think of a non-cheesy way to approach it.  This murder plot coupled with a ghostly sub-plot complement each other nicely; while the amateur sleuth is trying to figure out who killed her friend, she's also got to reconcile her feelings about the afterlife and if her murdered friend is still in her apartment.

I still need a title for this thing.  I can't keep calling it "New Idea" ...

Edit:
Ah, I've got a title:  Die once, and then ...

It's actually taken from a Bible verse which some use to prove there are no ghosts.  But it's got all the elements of a murder mystery in it as well.  We'll see if it sticks.

Procrastination?

I've gotten a little done in planning another story.  They come up whenever they feel like it, so I have to take care of them when they do.  This one is a murder mystery.

I'm only getting so far with it, though.  I have the beginning.  I have (I think) a pretty creative murder.  What I don't have is a middle and an end.  But these things eventually fall into place.  In the meantime, I'm writing down little details I think of.  Even if I don't know where to put them right now, they might just fit in later.

It's still just about half a month to NaNoWriMo, so I can't get started writing my main project the way I really want to.  What have I been procrastinating with?  Check it out:

moar funny pictures

Am I wrong?  I was watching Demetri Martin the other day thinking, "Wow, he totally reminds me of someone..." and I figured it out today when I watched a Shahid Kapoor movie this afternoon while I wasn't writing.

Also, I'm pretty sure I'm giving up on the novel I finished earlier this year, which I refer to as "Exchange".  It doesn't even have a proper title.  It's not keeping my interest while I edit.  I don't know.  Maybe later I'll polish it up and it'll be good, or maybe I can chalk it up to practice and push it aside.  (It really was excellent practice.)

Exchange

For those of you who read and loved The Silent Treatment (pictured to the right in printed book form), I wrote another "episode" back in February, featuring the same basic characters.  This is sort of my answer to Nancy Drew.

Since I finished up with my mammoth outline for Awake (which I'll be doing the first draft for in November ... but you already knew that), I needed something to occupy my time.  Exchange has been happily sitting in my "novels" folder for quite a few months now, and I figure it's about time to get it polished up and send it out to work.

Outlines, Audiobooks, and other rambling stuff

The Outline (again)

Yes, I got my outline to 50,000 words (and worked much too hard to make the number exact). It's excessive, and I'm guessing the finished product won't be much longer than that. Although, I've got to add all the dialogue, so that could take up a few thousand more words. I think the story itself is nice and solid now. When I wrote it before, I only got up to 40,000 words, and there were way too many plot gaps for it to be considered good at all. Ask me on December 1st if the monstrous outline was worth it.

Audiobooks

In an effort to keep my brain happily occupied at work while I'm doing things that don't require much thought, I've been looking for something worthwhile to listen to. I found a very good website called LibriVox, which specializes in making public domain (i.e. classic) books available free to the public. Today, I started listening to the German version of The Picture of Dorian Gray, and the guy who reads it makes me love the German language more than I thought I would (very expressive ... beautiful voice).

Yes, I understand a little German. In listening to this book (got through 3 and a half chapters before I went home), I understood about half of it. It helps a lot that I'm familiar with the story already.

But the website (LibriVox) has mostly English books. I haven't listened to any of the others yet, but I'm looking forward to letting my brain occupy itself with some classics while my hands sort the mail/email at work.

The Picture of Dorian Gray

I'd really forgotten how much I enjoyed this story. I've read it 2 or 3 times already, and saw a movie version of it (from 1945). I didn't like that movie because Dorian didn't show any emotions ... I don't think that's an accurate portrayal of the character because even though Dorian became evil, that doesn't necessarily mean he's got a blank face all the time.

I even got to thinking that my current project, Awake, is sci-fi/fantasy in the same way that The Picture of Dorian Gray is sci-fi/fantasy. That is, a tiny plot point is supernatural, and the rest of the story is rooted in reality. I enjoy reading things like that because I don't have to learn a completely new world or alien races, etc. (such as Lord of the Rings -- which I loved, by the way).

Awake is also a mystery in the same way that the TV show Lost is a mystery. There's no "whodunnit" to figure out, just a big "what the heck just happened??" As such, it's extremely difficult to categorize my story. Is it urban fantasy? mystery? literary ... something? Ah, you guys don't know because I'm not giving out any plot details, am I? I like that to be a secret because ... I just do.

I guess genre placement doesn't matter a whole lot, and I'm not worried about it. But when it comes to submission (It'll get to that point probably this time next year once I'm done with the tedious and numerous edits), it helps to pick out who to send it to. Anyway. Doesn't matter. Thanks for reading all this rambling!

Stupid?

It's like an addiction. If you'll observe the panel to your right, you'll see that I'm once again going for the 50,000 word mark in February.

That's right. The shortest month. And this month, I have plenty of other stuff to do. But you know, sometimes when you're the busiest, you need the biggest escape. This is it for me. It's also a sequel (or beginning of a series) to the one I did in November. Yay mysteries!

Aaand I'm done.

I'm surprised that finishing not only 50,000 words, but also finishing the novel only took 17 days. I'm not going to pretend it's quality work just yet (first draft, you know), but it's a good, solid start. So as the month wears on, I'm going to go back over a few scenes and write them from different perspectives; later on when I do my editing, I'll have lots of stuff to choose from, maybe even push my word count up even further.

I'm also thinking about making this novel into a series ... I sort of got the Nancy Drew bug from it and think my characters would do well in other settings, handling other types of mysteries. We'll see.