If you are Sebastian Faulks, you can finish writing a novel in six weeks. It takes me a little longer.

My last post on writing was over two years ago. At the time I was still basking in the glow from having written a 50,000 précis for a trilogy, and I was making plans to write the trilogy proper that November.

As it turned out, NaNoWriMo in 2006 was very bad.

I was running a Call of Cthulhu campaign, one of my own invention, and doing the prep work for that was sucking up more or less all of my writing time (this was when I still had regular writing time, before B was born). I decided to write a novel based on some of the ideas I was playing with in that campaign - not the campaign story itself, but novelising the successor steps for what would happen next.

It was horrible. I have glanced at one or two pages of the story and the writing is not bad, but the story never came together, the characters never did anything interesting, and the whole heap just collapsed under its own weight. I have still not dared to actually read the whole story. I may never do so.

2007 as a whole contained almost no writing. What with my fear of what was in the top drawer of my desk and the arrival of child #2, the only writing I did for the first three quarters of the year was prep work for the CoC campaign. However, I still participated in NaNoWriMo.

November 2007 went much better. I had postponed working on the Kissiltur trilogy in 2006 because I did not have the time to do the prep work that I felt the story deserved (mostly that the geography of the Empire of Kissiltur is still mushy). Truth to tell, I still didn't but I was also much more confident about the story itself and so I decided to go for it. This was despite every morning and evening being filled with child care duties...

When was I going to write?

I wrote in my lunch hour at work.

In previous years I had gone to a number of NaNoWriMo write-ins. I made it to the kick off in 2007, but never got to a single write-in. As it turned out, the lunchtime writing got me most of the way. If I have a clear idea of where I am going with a story, I can bash out around 1500 words in an hour. That is most of what is needed for the daily word quota, so I managed to get everything written without short-changing my family too much.

The best bit for me is that I still really like the story, the setting and the characters of the Kissiltur universe. The first book of the trilogy ended up being my longest NaNo draft to date at around 58,000 words [Update: it was actually 57,038 - so much for the vagaries of memory]. I have had some good feedback from readers and I am enjoying looking at it again.

Which is what I ought to be doing right now, in fact. My main birthday present this year was to have a weekend to myself to work on my book. Jen took the boys down to visit grandma this weekend, and I have been writing.

Just my luck to have a blah Saturday... my goal for the weekend was another 20,000 words. I wrote 8,700 words yesterday so I am not going to make 20k now, but I should reach 15k or thereabouts.

Back to the writing.

Posted by Dunx at June 15, 2008 07:09 AM