Nanowrimo: Last Day

Well, it's Nov. 30. My final wordcounts are:

Amulet II - 55,042 words
Taint/Amulet I - 20,569 words
Total: 75,611 words

I wrote about 4k words toward Taint tonight, to finish off my month. Taint actually could continue taking off and expanding onwards in a big mush of melodrama. I've figured out part of the problem with that one. I've been working on writing the climax scenes. But the climax needs to take place in the *middle* of the novel, after a whole lot of buildup so that the average reader will actually care enough about the characters that it *won't* look like melodrama by the time they get to reading the climax scenes. This means I need to write the beginning ... what's going into the beginning? I have some fuzzy ideas forming, but nothing solid enough to write yet. This is going to take some thinking.

Meanwhile, Amulet II is nowhere near done. Unfortunately, I need to reread what I have so far and write up a good cliffs notes version to myself, make a coherent outline, and probably list all the characters and their motivations. Otherwise I really don't have a clue how it's supposed to end. And there are dozens of tiny plotholes developing everywhere, too. I need to address all of those.

As for Amulet I, it seems to be on hold indefinitely, until I get my act together on Taint and Amulet II. It's way too fuzzy right now to pin down in actual writing. One of the two MCs turns out not to have a very plausible personality. Normally when I start writing a character for the first time, breath life into them, they take over almost immediately. Not so for poor Edward Duchene. He seems to be stillborn. So I need to rethink a few things.

All three of these novels have overlapping scenes with each other. I'm not quite sure how exactly it'll all break down into different novels at this point. A whole lot of Taint might actually work well as part of Amulet II, and the rest of it in Amulet I, and therefore I don't need a whole separate novel. But I don't know that for sure yet, as it's a fairly hefty set of plotlines with the two MCs involved for Taint, that aren't really *that* integral to the other main plotlines.

Meanwhile I'm already itching to begin getting the groundwork set up for Triangle, Fall of Myan, and Birthright ...

But the top of the priority list for things to finish must be Stranger on a Bus. The Labor Day Novel that I never did get around to finishing off. There's still the same 3 chapters left that I had before. I wrote the first half of chapter 10 at the end of September, and then never got back to it after that.

To help prod me along on all of these things, I signed up for NaNoFiMo at http://www.nanofimo.org . It's being run by pookel off of Nanowrimo. The basic idea is to use December as National Novel Finishing Month. Write 30k new words toward a novel-in-progress, though starting a brand new one from scratch is also allowed. The rules didn't specify whether I could spread those 30k words around to several different novels, but that's what I'd end up doing.

Meanwhile, I'm badly overcommitted with online roleplaying again. Which is bizarre, considering that I took all of November off from roleplaying. But somehow I managed to get sucked into still more new projects (and one recycled one that suddenly came back to life out of nowhere). Running my own Dark Ages game is at the top of the priority list there, of course, followed by the game where I do lots of wordcrafting. Followed by the game that I'm helping some other people run. Then there's 6-8 other games that I play in, or am considering playing in. I guess I'm going to be rotating which ones I pay attention to on a weekly basis. Then I also volunteered to help out the website as a whole with its portrait gallery. I really need to stop making friends. :p