tomorrow it begins

tomorrow is november the first, when the annual nanowrimo kicks off, and i’m participating again this year. i’m finishing the novel i started last year at this time. it was something like 65,000 words when i was only half done, and because shit happens, i never got around to writing more.

but jim and i have been reading my daily output from last year, a night at a time, and we’re going to finish it up tonight with the 21st day of writing. we’re only halfway thru the plot.

we’ve only just gotten into the real fiction part of the story. the first part was almost verbatim what actually happened, and now it’s almost completely fiction from here on out.

i thought i would get to the end of what i’d written last year and change everything that was to come, but at this point i haven’t figured out what to change, so i’m going to stick to the plot i figured out last year. it’s somewhere in the beginning of this blog, if you’re interested in scrolling way down.

i hope you’re entertained by it. it should approach farce pretty quickly.

the trouble will be, as always, getting time to sit down and write. last year it was my first priority, but this year i can’t actually go somewhere and isolate myself from everything, so i’m not expecting it to go as smoothly as it did last year.

but we’ll see.

stay tuned as i write page after page of hopeless drivel that nonetheless keeps me and jim pretty entertained.

reading the manuscript so far

so jim and i are reading th e story out loud, a day’s work a night. we’re up do day 5, chapter 3. i’m noticing that things go by very tersly, with not much development. i’m finding i don’t much like the dialog, which sounds stiff.

mainly we’re both amused because we know these events to intimately from when they happened and we changed the names.

it’s a good thing that the plot diverges from reality early on, and by the time i take up the keyboard again we will be in completely uncharted territory.

it’s fun reading what i wrote last year. i took loads of the dialog straight out of recent memory or saved email, and wrote everything as it was happening in my construction news blog.

i’m reading it because i need to know what i’ve written if i’m going to finish writing it, and ji’m’s hearing it because i sat with him day after day for a month and he never knew what i was writing.

november’s coming, cathy hasn’t eaten

after not having written word one since last november’s mad orgy of novelling, this november i will be going back to try and finish cathy eats her words .

unlike last year, i won’t be participating in any of the hand-holding meet your local fellow-nanowrimo contestant thing at coffee shops around atlanta.

what i will do is to print out all the already written chapters and review my notes.

my husband hasn’t read anything i wrote last year, because i wrote it while i was hanging out on a custom mural job he’d taken on. we went to these rich buckhead people’s home and painted on their wall every day last november. jim painted on the wall, i sat and typed, we brought a boombox and some classical music, we brought lunch, we brought the dogs. and i sat and wrote a novel for the four hours or so that we were there. got 6,000 words written a day that way. bang bang bang on the typewriter keys (click click click).

so i’ll get him to read what i’ve already written. i’ll read it myself. then i’ll have a comletely different idea of what the ending should be, because i’ve had a year to let it sit and simmer, and he’ll help me come up with the twists and turns it will have to take to get there from here.

lots of shit has to happen.