Well, nuts. Last night my goal was to cross the 40,000 word threshold, but I just missed it. I was tired, and I was at the end of the chapter, and I didn’t want to force myself through those last 400 words.
However! This morning I wrote very well and got over the line, though I didn’t actually check my wordcount yet. And I finally got my characters into a long-awaited secret chamber, though the lovebirds have started fighting and things will generally be downhill from here.
At around 30,000 words, the middle of last week, my novel took an unexpected turn. It was something I should have seen coming, but didn’t: once I started writing what I had in my outline, I realized that it was stupid and made no sense. So I wrote something else. This got my stuck and result in a several-day-long slowdown of my work. The whole point of having an outline is to know what I’m doing so that I can write quickly, but this doesn’t work when the outline violates the core premise of the story.
I eventually worked my way out of it and got back onto the outline, though with a missing chapter and a really rough spot that needs to be worked over in editing. My protags got hitched and laid. This means that I’ve passed the logical midpoint of the story, and now I can get to work tearing them apart and destroying everything that they love.
This story is going to be so much longer than 50,000 words.
See that progress bar over there? See how it’s suspiciously close to half-full?
That is an optical illusion, children. It is, in fact, just over half full: 25,838 words out of 50,000. It merely appears to be less than half full because of the drop-shadow on the left, and our general inability to visually assess exact ratios.
The novel goes swimmingly. The first 20,000 words ripped right along in the first ten days or so. I stalled slightly getting to 25,000 (which was my goal for Tuesday 11/11, but wasn’t actually met until Thursday 11/13), because I found that I had to stop and explain a great many things, and because my protag was recalcitrant about falling in love with his intended.
However! Things seem to have cleared up between the soon-to-be-happy couple, so I foresee sexy fun times at the end of the chapter, all the better to lead into the mysterious ancient artifacts and world-shattering catastrophe in the latter half of the book.
New goal: 30,000 words by Sunday (11/16) night.
There is a particular type of fantasy story that has at its core an elaborate religious or social ritual, the more shocking and bizarre the better. I mean things like His One True Bride by Darja Malcolm-Clarke, Break the Vessel by Vylar Kaftan, or The Chosen by Ricardo Pinto. The subtext of these stories is usually that the religious beliefs underlying the ritual are false, and that they oppress those that participate in them. The opposite type also exists, in which someone, usually an outsider, derides the poor local superstition and gets his comeuppance for it.
Kingspeaker by Marie Brennan seems to be one of this type, but its conclusion does something amazing with the trope.
(Mild spoilers follow.)
At the opening of the story we see the female protagonist being stripped of her own voice to speak with the voice of the King. This seems at first to be merely ritual–she still speaks, and even speaks to the king, though she insists that she’s only saying the king’s words back to him. At the novel’s climax, though, the king becomes psychologically unable to say what he needs to say, and in a crucial moment the protag decides to speak up without the king’s command.
But notice: the protag doesn’t speak up for herself, which would violate the ritual logic presented in the story. Instead, she speaks in the voice of the king, saying what truly are the king’s words, the words the king cannot bring himself to say. Right at the place where I expected to see the ritual subverted, it was instead affirmed in a dramatic and ironic way. I was tickled with delight.
Things are rocking. Having an outline of the entire book has been incredibly helpful, as I’m able to charge through the actual scene-setting without having to stop and worry about what happens next. I’ve discovered something about my writing process: actually putting words on the page is the easy part for me, the fun part. The plotting is the hard part: I usually start with a very vague beginning and a very vague ending for my stories, and I spend all of my time trying to figure out how to get from A to B. If I do all of the plotting up front, then the writing itself is a breeze.
Anyway, I was at about 8,000 words this morning, and by this evening I expect to break 10K. Two days early! W00t!
Today I got spam advertising a series of very nice apartments in Ulaanbaatar. I have to ask myself: how many people are really interested in moving to Outer Mongolia? I am, obviously, but I think that the real market for such a thing would be rather small.
So this year I’m doing–or attempting to do–NaNoWriMo. Never done it before. I managed to finish my first novel without artificial deadlines pushing me along, but my second novel has been stalled for almost a year. I started one this spring, abandoned it about one-third of the way through, and haven’t written anything longer than a short story since. (Not that there’s anything wrong with shorts, but I’ve got books in my head, and they need getting out, too.)
So: NaNo. Today was day one, and I wrote in every spare moment and managed to churn out just shy of 4000 words. Woot! I only need 1667 words per day to win, so at this rate I’ll coast to an easy victory. I note with pride that only one person in my group of writing buddies is ahead of me at the moment, and after tomorrow I may be able to claim the lead.
(I’ll get one of those wordcount widgets up here soon, but the site is busy and slow today with all of the traffic, so it’ll have to wait for things to settle down.)
It’s ironic that my first published story is one of the quickest-written stories I’ve ever done.
On Wednesday, I read Vylar Kaftan’s challenge to writers to write a fantasy piece about movies for the Cinema Spec anthology. The anthology was near closing, and the editor Karen Romanko had said that she was still looking for a high fantasy story.
Now, I had an idea for a somewhat-appropriate story that had been mellowing in my head for a long time. It wasn’t high fantasy as I originally intended it, but I was able to make some minor tweaks to the premise to make it fit. It wound up not being secondary-world fantasy but a portal fantasy–close enough that I hoped it would meet the editor’s needs. So I banged it out in a few hours Wednesday night, and mailed it to a few friends Thursday. Based on their feedback I revised it on Friday–and submitted, two hours before the deadline.
Karen was wonderful, and responded within a few days saying she was holding it for a second look. About a week after that I got the acceptance notice.
The moral of the story is: A good way to get published is to write something that fits an editor’s needs, even if you have to crank it out in 48 hours :).
You know what I got in the mail a little while ago? A message saying that my story Screening of a Silent Film was accepted for publication. Woot! First sale!
The story will appear in the anthology Cinema Spec: Tales of Hollywood and Fantasy, forthcoming in early 2009.
J.S. Bangs 
