Author Topic: Writing: NaNoWriMo 2016 (Read 10247 times)

Darkhawk · « **Reply #30 on:** November 30, 2016, 08:01:37 pm »

Quote from: Kylara;199549

50402!

Woo! I got over 50K and took a break. No writing was happening while the preschooler had a friend over anyway. Gonna try to finish this chapter tonight. (I'm, I think, a bit under halfway through.)

Quote

and still have four characters to do back history on. Ended up scrapping the full novel approach a week or so ago, and just exploring the characters, how they grew up and how they got on the ship. Since this is all prep for an RPG I'm going to run, that is the important stuff! Will have to finish it up here in the next week or so too

Oh, that's a clever way of doing prep.

Sobekemiti · « **Reply #31 on:** November 30, 2016, 10:59:45 pm »

Quote from: Darkhawk;199487

I see we have a winner!

Yes! Thank you! I won on the 24th, after writing the last 5.5k that day. The rest of the month was going to be very busy and there were a few hot days and I didn't want to write if I didn't have to.

I ended up about 3/4 of the way through my novel, which ended up in the apocafic territory. There are probably a lot of plot holes and other logical things to fix up because why plan beforehand when you can make it up as you go along, amirite???

The basic premise ended up being that the Titans escaped from Tartarus *in a different universe* and ended up in this one because the gods are weaker and easier to overthrow because they haven't had the same run of constant worship. Which is how Adelaide got destroyed woooo.

Anyway, I ended up with three main characters, which is more than I had at the start of the month. All witches, all pagan, all some flavour of queer, two Hekate devotees, one who is a vet for all sorts of mythical beasts, one who is intersex. Hermes ends up taking them, with Hekate, to this other universe (that's part of two other novels I'm writing go me I did not want a trilogy but oh well), and they end up in Cyrene, where Athena takes them in (in this other universe, She is the patron of Cyrene, not Apollon), and now there are refugees from Earth starting to pour in and they're all getting used to being in a city where polytheistic religion isn't a rarity and there are functioning temples and churches and other things and it's a fabulous distraction from gods desperately trying to stop the Titans coming back once they are done with Earth. WOOOO.

...On the other hand, I now know what happened to the Egyptian gods in that universe and what nearly destroyed them. OH GOOD. O:

Anyway, Imma go and do a helluva lot of worldbuilding and get my notes and worlds organised before I go back to finish these things, if I have three novels set in the same universe. Go me! *headdesk*

Kylara · « **Reply #32 on:** December 01, 2016, 08:17:31 am »

Quote from: Sobekemiti;199586

Yes! Thank you! I won on the 24th, after writing the last 5.5k that day. The rest of the month was going to be very busy and there were a few hot days and I didn't want to write if I didn't have to.

I ended up about 3/4 of the way through my novel, which ended up in the apocafic territory. There are probably a lot of plot holes and other logical things to fix up because why plan beforehand when you can make it up as you go along, amirite??? The basic premise ended up being that the Titans escaped from Tartarus *in a different universe* and ended up in this one because the gods are weaker and easier to overthrow because they haven't had the same run of constant worship. Which is how Adelaide got destroyed woooo.

Anyway, I ended up with three main characters, which is more than I had at the start of the month. All witches, all pagan, all some flavour of queer, two Hekate devotees, one who is a vet for all sorts of mythical beasts, one who is intersex. Hermes ends up taking them, with Hekate, to this other universe (that's part of two other novels I'm writing go me I did not want a trilogy but oh well), and they end up in Cyrene, where Athena takes them in (in this other universe, She is the patron of Cyrene, not Apollon), and now there are refugees from Earth starting to pour in and they're all getting used to being in a city where polytheistic religion isn't a rarity and there are functioning temples and churches and other things and it's a fabulous distraction from gods desperately trying to stop the Titans coming back once they are done with Earth. WOOOO.

...On the other hand, I now know what happened to the Egyptian gods in that universe and what nearly destroyed them. OH GOOD. O:

Anyway, Imma go and do a helluva lot of worldbuilding and get my notes and worlds organised before I go back to finish these things, if I have three novels set in the same universe. Go me! *headdesk*

that sounds fascinating!

Darkhawk · « **Reply #33 on:** December 01, 2016, 11:52:31 am »

Quote from: Sobekemiti;199586

Ooh premises of the stories, that's a thing I can throw in on:

I'm dealing with a steampunk fantasy 'verse in what's basically a tight expy of Victorian London. It's not London - the Underground isn't all Underground, there are elevated clockwork trolleys and such - and (as I am quite aware especially after my researches into the Pagan Soup which involves a lot of flows of what's going on in the time period) there isn't a really strong divide between Clockwork Science! and belief in ghosts and fairies and so on (though many people don't believe in the ghosts and fairies).

My main character is a young woman whose family runs one of the beacons - giant lighthouses whose beams pierce through the Fog, an unexplained phenomenon which has been getting more and more intense within living memory. She has become interested in investigating the Fog and is in the process of learning How To Science At It.

Supporting characters include:

- a brilliant, occasionally cross-dressing mad scientist with a laser rifle, a specialist in optics
- his wife, an alchemist who scandalised society by continuing to publish in the field for a bit after her first husband died
- a foul-mouthed Irish* engineer who is building clockwork chimneysweepers
- a maker of alchemical glassware who had to close her inherited shop down because of being a female proprietor, Jewish*
- her husband, a Jewish* kabbalistic alchemist with a tendency to rattle on tediously about his research
- a short-tempered, blunt, lower-class, socialist, lesbian genius who can shoot holes in anyone's theories
- a female blacksmith (only permitted to make nails, officially)
- a desi* polio survivor and poor children's educator
- her brother, trained an ayurvedic medical practitioner, working as a gardener
- a very proper elderly widow with complicated feelings about women, mad science, and propriety
- a well-heeled young man, a member of the mad scientist gentleman's club that is one of the focal points of the story, astronomer

* I am still going back and forth on whether naming the minority groups their real world terminology is better or worse than either making something up or leaving them unspecified

(I did not intend for this to be a meditation on global warming and the choice of a young white woman trying to decide whether to ally with the underprivileged or with her own class/race status, but there you go.)

Kylara · « **Reply #34 on:** December 02, 2016, 08:53:27 am »

Quote from: Darkhawk;199607

Ooh premises of the stories, that's a thing I can throw in on:

(I did not intend for this to be a meditation on global warming and the choice of a young white woman trying to decide whether to ally with the underprivileged or with her own class/race status, but there you go.)

Isn't it funny how stories take on a life of their own! Yours sounds interesting too.

I was actually writing for a purpose this year, was creating backstory for an RPG I'm going to run, so had about 30 characters that are sailors on a ship (which will be 'home town' for the game), and most of the sailors are mixed-race...on a world where that wasn't even a thing until this generation. So when I started writing I thought I was just going to be talking about how the ship crew got together and then how they started doing what they do (instead of sailing a regular trade route, they specialize in hunting down obscure relics and/or hard to acquire resources).

but I quickly realized that what I really needed to explore was what brought each character to the ship (because the bulk of them aren't sailors by trade)...which required knowing what their childhood was like....which required knowing how they came to be born (for those with parents of different races) And because there are some sailors that are not mixed-race, I had to know why they chose to join the ship.

There ended up being a TON more racial politics than I thought....and I also came to realize I'm much better at writing about horrible childhoods than happy ones (I think like 3 out of my 30 have actual happy childhoods lol)

But it was actually a lot of fun, trying to sort out the motivations and stories of all these characters. And ones that I only had basic physical descriptions of when I started ended up becoming full fleshed and 'real' to me..I know their personalities, their secrets and what motivates them....all of which is RPG gold for running a game!