Saturday 11 November 2006

Pic of the day: "How should I describe her... It's like she's only doing what she wants, not caring about other opinions." The caption is from the anime Tokimeki Memorial - Only Love, but it is also a very good description of the girl in my novel. It also happens to be the kind of girl I like in real life, not that it matters.

NaNoWriMo leave

Sometimes you have to make difficult choices. And sometimes the difficulties come from not making choices in the first place.

I'm still alive as of writing this, which I actually do on November 25th. I have 8500 words left to write over these 5 days to "win" NaNoWriMo, the (inter)National Novel Writing Month. The only requirement is to have written 50 000 words in the form of a novel during the month of November. The novel does not need to be complete (in fact, very few novels are as short as 50 000 words). It is certainly not expected to be good... it does not even need to make sense, except on the purely semantic level. That is to say, it has to follow the rules of some language, but there does not need to be a plot and the characters don't need to be believable.

Regular readers will know that I rarely hold onto a fad for more than two weeks. This also came to pass this time. But this time I did not give up, as I did the first of three years. Nor did I start a new book, like I did last year. (The sum of the two books last year was more than 50 000 words, but each of them was not, so I still lost. They were also not particularly good, what there was of them. But as I mentioned, that is not a requirement. The writing being one book rather than two, however, is.)

What I did this time was, after a little while, to start writing about things that interest me, but in the context of the novel. It doesn't really make sense as far as plot is concerned, but plot is not concerned this time and so neither am I. So my characters discuss some of my other books for a couple of chapters. There is a guest appearance by one of my role-playing characters from the Acid Reflux forum. My main character becomes involved with some kind of quasi-scientific religion or perhaps quasireligious science from the real world. Then there is a chapter devoted to The Sims 2. In the next chapter I intend to write about City of Heroes. After that I should be able to wrap up the story if I feel so inclined. Or perhaps I won't. Whatever gets me past 50 000 is fine. And then I hope to return to my life, such as it is. Which includes this journal... such as it is.