My 2006 NaNoWriMo novel is very bad.

I knew this when I was writing it. It was a slog all the way through - it was meant to be apocalyptic horror and turned into people whinging about their jobs. The setting was wrong, the characters were weak. And that was before I actually read the thing.

Well, I finally screwed my courage to the sticking place and opened the covers a few days ago. The first chapter is engaging enough, with some vivid descriptions and interesting observations, but that was the high point. After that things fell into the pit pretty quickly, hauling in characters that had no right to be there, dangling shiny plot points but never explaining them, and then jumping from scene to scene with no connections made at all.

The ending, of course, was wildly rushed. I remember this was the year that I was writing up to the last day because I needed all of that time to even hit 50k.

Some of the names were quite good, though, such as a minister called Pastor Gabriel Truth.

This is not a novel that is going to continue in this form. I do want to tell this story, but I already have a better form for it and will work on that at some point. There's not much to recover from this particular train wreck.

Posted by Dunx at December 16, 2009 08:40 AM