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Tuesday, November 1, 2011

Chicken and Waffle

Yep. So here it is again, nanotime, when incipient novelization is supposed to be translated into actuality at 1667 words per day. This will be my fourth attempt. I've successfully navigated the nanowaters before thrice, but have never had the particular set of challenges I face this time-namely, embarking on a novel without any preliminaries.
I was originally going to work on a delayed project, Vermilion Dawn, set many years after Martian colonization. That novel needs some seed from a previous novel to work properly, though, and much rumination led to deciding upon a "rewrite" of a novel I've started several times but haven't finished, in an attempt to exorcise that ghost once and for all.
So, after much waffling, hemming, and hawing,  I withdrew Vermilion Dawn in favor of Fallen Earring, dragged out my ten thousand docs and links and books and whatnot about Hendrix, and furiously began scribbling, in longhand on notebook paper, my proposed outline. That was the day before Hallowe'en.
The floor in my office became decorated with paper balls not long after that. I spent part of a mostly sleepless night shooting them through a Nerfoop I have hanging next to the door and ruminating about how to make the thing work.
Fallen Earring is a genrehopper, a rule-breaker. An altworld themed-story collection that masquerades as a novel and takes place mostly via flashback. I've been working on it on and off for a few years now-the themes and settings of the thing are burned into my brain (like some of my other unwritten or unpublished "works"), and I cannot let them go. The problem is that I hadn't arrived at the proper method of telling the story.
Still not sure that I have. I've gone from third person limited to third omniscient, from present tense to past, to first person, to having different characters tell the story. I've tried having Jimi as a character, which doesn't work at all, having him as the narrator, which really doesn't work on an extended basis, adding metafictional frameworks, turning the events of the narrative this way and that, trying semi-desperately to find a way, the right way, to GET THE DAMN STORY TOLD.
I think I have it. Now I just need to finish up several other projects so I can get at the thing. And hope against hope that I don't change my friggin mind again.
My ancient colored-pencil and smeared-marker pic has been pressed into service as the cover. I added some lettering I developed a couple of years ago, did a little photoshop sharpening, and that was that.
Now I just need to do the writing. I'm actually shooting for @75k, as that's the projected wordcount of the whole thing, and I'm still waffling over whether or not to edit what I do each day and put it up here. Very possible-I'm going to take a look at what I actually have and make that decision.
On other fronts-I'm still waiting for GoDaddy to finish the transfer of my domain to my new webhost so I can get after rebuilding my website. I was hoping that could be done before NaNoWriMo so as not to complicate things any more than they already are, but no go. That's going to be a cause for more waffling as I try to decide whether to go with a more conventionall website or to make everything wordpress. Very likely that it'll be some combination of the two like I've had before, but I just don't know. I'm pretty sore about the short shrift I got from GoDaddy and really don't want to do a whole bunch of coding. That's all up in the air for now.
I almost chickened out of Nano, but when I was established as the community leader from Writing Forums, I had to buck up and run with the ball. WF recently promoted me to global moderator from my previous position as forum mod. Have to set a good example.

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