I alluded yesterday to some decisions that I have made about my writing. I thought I should elucidate a little.

I have now participated in the glorious NaNoWriMo twice, winning both times. I am quite happy with both of the novels that resulted, but I am more or less stalled on getting any further with either of them.

"The Vampire Hunter" now has a new name, and I have been adding more and more layers onto it: trying to make the story richer and the characters more convincing. The problem is that it is still mostly in first person, which makes much of the writing very difficult (my "alternating third person chapters" trick did not work), and the work to get a reasonable second draft out has run into the sand.

My decision is to start afresh - apply a NaNo-like process to a third person version, use tighter outlines, and shoot for more words since editing down 100,000 is likely to be easier than adding to 50,000.

This decision is partly driven by my experience with the 2005 event, when I completed "The Flame Crown of Kissiltur" in fine style (my problems were more to do with starting work again than the writing itself). The chapters were of more even length, the characters were better structured, and the writing went much more smoothly.

"Flame Crown" itself is on hold, waiting to be turned into the trilogy it really wants to be. There is so much more depth to the world than I managed to fit into 50,000 words last November, so much plot that got skipped in order to get the main story arc done. I am still happy with it conceptually, but there is just a lot more writing to be done on it.

This year's NaNoWriMo? I don't know. My original plan was to get TVHv2 done this year, but that doesn't look like it will happen now - as long as I get some work done on it I will be happy. November will probably see me either working on volume 1 of the "Flame Crown" trilogy, or making a start on a sequel to TVH which was Choice #2 for NaNo2006.

All of this assumes rather more time being spent on the novel writing than currently, but that is another conversation, and another set of decisions.

Posted by Dunx at April 26, 2006 10:01 AM