Day One: 2687 Words

Not bad for the first 24 hours, during which I had to do some heavy-handed modding of a chat channel, and for which I got cussed out and insulted yea verily. Not very conducive to thinking about novels, lemmetellya.

Anyway, I completely ditched all of my writing plans on Friday, and now I've somehow started working on The Fall of Myan. It's the story at the end of the Fortress Launne timeline, where a neighboring city gets overrun by zombies.

Since I didn't know that's what I'd be writing, I had to do a lot of cramming before I started. My notes are from 2003. There are details of the plotlines that I still don't fully recall, even with the notes in front of me. There are parts where I apparently assumed I'd remember what I was talking about and wouldn't need to explain. ("Party A does X to Party B to distract Party C from Y ... yaddayaddayadda ... and all of this was a clever ploy to distract everyone from realizing that Party A is really after Martha." Who is Martha? Doh!) Then I found some more notes (my notes organization "scheme" isn't terribly organized), in the form of a Corel Wordperfect 3.5 file for OS pre-X - which my current computer doesn't run. Luckily, Wordperfect files still display a lot of the text in a text editor, even if there are a bunch of weird symbols everywhere. (And Martha was fully explained in them. Yay!)

I wrote the first scene and a half last night, for 1566 total words, slept a bit, got woken up around 11am, trundled downstairs around noon, did a few other things, and then finished that scene and another one. Now I'm a bit lost on what to write next.

See, the problem is that although I have notes for Fall of Myan, they're notes for a roleplaying game, not a novel. Which means that I have a lot of backstory and plotting, but no actual viewpoint characters. In a roleplaying game, that's what players are for. So I've been limping along trying to figure out how best to actually tell the story.

So far it's looking like I'll have to invent some main characters lickity split. It might be the pack of mercenaries that are (one of the groups) behind the existence of the zombies. Of course, in my notes, they're the bad guys and they're supposed to lose, which doesn't make them very good protagonists unless they're going to change sides at the end. I won't say they wouldn't, because I don't actually know them (not having developed them as characters at all so far), but I can't assume they will, either. Because characters never do what I hope. :p

My longterm plan is to get to 50k on this story as fast as possible, no matter how crappy (first drafts usually are, aren't they?) and then hope to have time to write another 50k on the Rumen stories. We'll see...