“It is the test’s fault for being too hard.” That is a normal human reaction, but let us be honest. It was my own fault and I could have avoided it if I had taken the project more seriously. Luckily it is not my living at stake, much less my life.

I failed to write 50 000 words on my novel in November, which is the challenge of the National Novel Writing Month (which is, by the way, international). Actually I lacked less than 3500 words, which I sometimes write in a day. Perhaps I did underestimate the Big (Secret) Event at work, which happened to fall on the last weekend of the month. But I had plenty of time to write before that.

The truth is that the characters did not really engage me, and probably would engage any other readers even less. The premise of the story was great, I think. I may reboot it if I live long enough. But for some reason, most of the characters did not click with me or each other. The most interesting was the weird cousin, who was not even meant to be in the story, I just roped her in because nothing would happen with the existing characters. Pretty much every major character was lacking basic social skills, and unfortunately they did not have other engaging traits to make up for it. I had some plot, but moving forward along it was like constipation.

Instead of writing about an augmented reality game combining the best elements of Ingress and Magic: The Gathering, I spent much of the month playing the actual Ingress, and had rather more fun. Although I think the game would have been better if it had been like the game in my novel, it was still more engaging than my novel.

Better luck another time, if there is another time.