Nano prepping

I'm 32 today. Happy birthday to me. :)

I now have a 2000 word outline for Amulet II. I'm pretty sure I know how the first 20k words or so will go, too. All of it will be through the eyes of Antoine - as he is informed about the quest they're going to embark on, as he pursues the hidden treasure that he and Adien wants - up until the point that they run afoul of Mindy.

After that point, I'm not quite sure where I'm going. At the moment I'm thinking the POV will switch to Mindy for her side of the story, and then devolve into a series of council meetings, wherein I'll be able to introduce the other subplot about the caern. But I don't want to lose focus on the main plot by getting too sidetracked into the caern side of things, either. It might turn out to be a balancing act of interspersing caern-related subplot scenes with amulet quest scenes. And I still don't know what exactly Nathaniel is going to be doing, except that his involvement is kind of key...

I haven't really looked at Amulet I again yet. Probably this weekend I'll dig up my notes and figure out a detailed outline for it.

As for Nano writing in general ... 20 weekdays, 10 weekend days if you include Thanksgiving. I'm thinking I should aim for 5k words on each weekend day. That would give me 50k words. Then I'd need to do another 50k on the weekdays, so, 2500 words per day. This is a higher bar than what I set for myself last year. Last year I aimed for 2500 words per day every day and didn't make it most of the time. My overall average was 2300 - but it was plenty sufficient to get me to a win at the standard 50k words. This year, though, 2500 is my minimum. Maybe I should aim for 3k instead so I have some room for falling short. At least weekends are realistic, if the bus story gives me a good indication. 5k per day when I've got nothing else to do should be within easy reach, and hopefully I'll go over that.

So, 500 words per hour was my cruising speed during the bus story. For 2500 per day ... means I need to write for 5 hours a day. Hmm... okay, I'm screwed. :) Guess it's going to be a whole month of takeout, lots of advanced cooking of big vats of things, and I really do need to get this place cleaned up before the month ends. Maybe next year I'll work extra hard and save up vacation and comp time so I can just take the entire month off from work ...

In other writing news, my game suffered the loss of a werewolf player at the beginning of the week. :( Now I'm down to two active ones. The vampire side of things seems to be going better - three characters in play with up to four more in the works. All I have to do is get up the motivation to post for them once a day. And for that matter post for my other games, too. I've been neglecting the heavy-writing one lately. It's my turn for all three characters now.

And I still need to finish that bus story. Just have to get the cobwebs in my brain to clear up long enough.