Yaaas, it's NaNoWriMo time! It’s that time of year again! NaNoWriMo is around the corner and writers all over the world are losing their cool, including me. This year in particular is a little bit complicated because I am currently organizing all of my writing projects and trying to get them all to a certain level of completion. That means that starting a new novel in a month doesn’t sound like quite the best idea. Instead, I’m going to try and do some interesting work with 50,000 words. I have two projects where if I wrote enough words to make both of them go at least 50,000 words, then I would have completed NaNo, in a way. Don’t get me wrong, I do have new novel ideas, and I have recently been playing around with actually planning novels instead of writing into the unknown. I just feel like with all my current projects, my time would be better invested, at the moment, if I finished actual projects I already have. The two main projects I'm thinking of working on are Hayley & Apollo and Superhumans. Both titles are very very bad, but you know, you gotta have a title at the end of the day, right? Hayley & Apollo, as the title might suggest, is a romance. It’s set in the far future, in a world ravished not only by the aftermath of climate change, but also by a spread of an expansive terrorist organization. It’s set in the same universe as some of my other novel projects, where a religious group called the Cleaners wreak havoc on cities because they see death as a deliverance. Hayley is a renowned thief and bounty hunter, using her talents to sell valuables on the black market all while working for the police to find criminals. When one of the criminals she must hunt down turns out to be a past love interest of hers, things get a bit messy. Little does she know that her childhood friend has drastically changed since their last encounter, as he has turned into one of the most powerful Cleaners of them all. As she starts to figure out his intentions, all while slowly falling in love with him all over again, she is faced with a choice: follow her morals and put an end to his schemes, or blindly follow her heart and join his cause. Superhumans is a dark Cute Mutants set in a conservative anti-mutant town. I am using the word 'mutants' for now because being in its early draft stages, I don't have an original cool sounding word for it. Even though Elise went through high school getting bullied and beaten up, never once did she wish for powers to fight back. But everything changes when, after getting hit by a classmate, she snaps. Against everything she ever thought she was, it turns out she does indeed have powers. And not just any power: the power to torture. Her life is in a tumult after the incident: her parents throw her into a facility for mutants, before she escapes to a mutant safe house where mutants fight pacifically for their rights. It’s a place where she should, by definition, feel like she belongs. But while others freely use and show off their good powers, she feels out of place with her inherently evil power. She starts to believe that fate had in mind for her to join the Ags – the aggressive mutant forces, who use force and fear to fight for their rights, even if she hates violence. But why else would she have such powers? Maybe she was meant to be a villain. Superhumans explores questions of identity and the dilemma of presumed fate. To get to 50,000 words on each of these projets, I’d have to write 35,000 words for Hayley & Apollo, and 27,000 words for Superhumans. That would be 62,000 words in total. Additionally, I am also planning on writing for and editing a couple of other projects. This includes a novel set in the same universe as Hayley & Apollo, be it a few years earlier. I am also going to work on my high fantasy, Othelion, and my alternative history romance, Stay. All of these projects already have more than 50,000 words, so I’m not putting pressure on myself to write too much for them, and rather, I’m focusing on the editing aspect. Be it as it may, Othelion, as a high fantasy, will need more than 50,000 words to be completed. I've already been editing these and other projects this past week, and will continue to do so in November. As a matter of fact, I was actually editing one of my novels and got so distracted I forgot to upload this blog post! But below is an example of what I’ve practically been doing this past week. I’ve been sorting out all the sequences and scenes and making all my projects follow the same format to make them all consistent. To illustrate, below are two screenshots of the navigation pane of one of my projects before and after I went through it. The one on the left is how I titled my scenes back in 2018ish. I seemed to be very fond of knowing what day of the week things happened. Needless to say, it looks much better and more organized now, even if it still needs some work. On scrivener As I seem to do every few years, I redownloaded Scrivener to try it out during Nanowrimo. But just as last time, as soon as I started using it, it felt pretty overwhelming. As such, I'm pretty sure I will not be using it this NaNo. Why have hundreds of folders and sub-documents when, by simply using Word, I can have one main draft document, and another where I collect the story's background information, outline, and beats? It's that simple, why make things more complicated? If anyone is interested, I made my accompanying documents very concise and aesthetic, so I could make it a template and share it on here. Let me know! What about DREAMING? Ah yes, the novel I say I’m querying, when in truth, I have sent out one batch of queries and got too scared to send the second batch I should have sent weeks ago. I have redone my query letter but I also plan to modify the first pages of my manuscript, only in little ways, to make it… better, I guess. I’m terrified of it not being good enough but I’m going to have to send it off at some point. I’m aiming for early to mid November, 15th November at the latest. Then another batch at the beginning of December and then nothing until mid January. Concerning the Rings of Power review video In my last post, I went on a weeeee long rant about the Rings of Power show, in which I promised to post a youtube video about it. I actually plan to rewatch and take notes on the whole series before that, though, so it might still take a while. Hold your horses tight, it's going to be a really cool video, I promise!
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