Prepping for Nanowrimo 2018!

It's been a busy year since last Nanowrimo, and very little of it had anything to do with fiction writing. I applied for and got accepted into a PhD program at the University of Auckland, New Zealand. Then I severely downsized my possessions to less than a quarter of what I had at this time last year, packed the surviving stuff into a U-Haul trailer that was just slightly less than the total weight that a Prius V could haul, drove it from Alabama to California, shipped it, sold the car, and got on a plane. And now I'm living in Nelson, NZ. The shipped stuff should arrive next month, by which time I will hopefully be living in a flat big enough to hold all of it without having to rent extra storage.

Needless to say, I haven't thought much about fiction in the last year. I did start cabins for Camp Nanowrimo both times, but mostly just watched the rest of my cabin mates write lots of words and cheered them on.  I'm relatively settled at the moment however (up until I move again and sort in my shipped stuff at least), so I took a look at the situation here.

On the Nanowrimo site, Nelson is under "New Zealand - Elsewhere" - which is basically everywhere that isn't a big city. So far no one has posted from the south island except me, so I assume I won't be going to any write-ins. (And even if there were people on the south island participating on the forum, I still probably wouldn't be able to go - it's a big island and I have no car).

So. What to work on this year. The two leading contenders are to continue with the Celestines project that I started last year, or to do more work on Fortress Launne. I'm leaning in the direction of the latter. About a third of Amulet II is getting moved into Triangle II Part 3, so the obvious next step is to write a full coherent version of Triangle II Part 3. I'm not sure I'll have anywhere near 50k words by the time I'm done, so I figure I'll do like last year and continue the Celestines from where I left off (if I have time).

The synopsis I just posted on Nanowrimo:

Triangle II is a three-part story where I've written most of the first draft material for the first two parts as parts of previous Nanos and other writing events, though mostly with the idea that they would be parts of other things than Triangle II, which didn't exist as an entity until after I'd written them (and large amounts of other Fortress Launne).

In Triangle II Part 1, the story follows Janis as she goes deep into the swamps to find a mythical medicine man named Aliacorba, because the city of Fortress Launne has a severe plague going on. Aliacorba agrees to come out and help. In the process he becomes Thomas Cougar.

In Triangle II Part 2, the king of Fortress Launne finds out about Thomas. Due to various political complexities, Thomas is (more or less) kidnapped away from Janis, and the royal intention is that they'll never see each other again. Thomas then goes on to finish solving the plague with all the resources of the king and court.

Triangle II Part 3 goes back to following Janis, who is not happy at all about Thomas's disappearance. Up until last year I didn't have any good ideas of what she was going to do next. I knew where things were supposed to end up, but not how to get there. Last year while preparing to rewrite Amulet II, I noticed that a good third of the first draft material would work a lot better if it was part of Triangle II instead.

So, this year I plan to properly write up Triangle II Part 3. Like last year, it might not be 50k words long (if it works the same way as for previous novel parts, the final result will be around 20-25k). If I have time at the end and still need words, I'll tack in work on something unrelated.