Friday 30 November 2007

Pic of the day: Proof! OK, not a very good proof, as I could have downloaded it from some other winner. But if in doubt, just go to NaNoWriMo and see if I'm not listed as a winner! Wheee! Now, wonder how the world has fared in my absence?

A winner is I!

Although my hand started to type "wiener", without my consent. But as of yesterday, I won NaNoWriMo again. That is to say, I wrote 50 000 words of novel in November. Admittedly that was not the whole novel, which would have been longer had I completed it. I probably won't do that, at least for some years. I have to decide whether to have more or less or no sexual temptations in it. The way I see it, sexual temptation are mandatory in your late teens. For most people well before and after that, too, but different things are more in the foreground in different parts of our lives.

The story was of course not about sex but about the Light, the benevolent magic that can be wielded by the absolutely honest for the good of all mankind and then some. Actually, I won't claim that you can do that here, though it is hard to say for lack of absolutely honest people. But in my novel, there are a few scattered Lightwielders, and one of them is my main character, a young man in his late teens, traveling with a female companion during the summer. It would be absurd if he did not have sexual temptations. But it would also be absurd for me to give my readers sexual temptations. How to balance this is something I hope to know in a few years, if I'm still around. I am quite uncertain of it right now.

But all this is beside the point. The point is that I wrote 50 000 words of novel-stuff again. And unlike last year, I did not throw in filler chapters where my characters played The Sims 2 or City of Heroes. Admittedly this may be because they live in a pre-industrial world, albeit just barely. (The printing press has recently gained some fame, within living memory. Of course, the living memory of some of the characters is several hundred years.)

So is it the morphic field or some such that has been improved by years of people writing NaNoWriMo novels? Or is it the tools? This year was my first of using Ywriter 3, a free word processor from Spacejock Software. It not only has the basic word processing features (and works well with speech recognition for those who have that) but also allows planning and a novel-related database inside the same program. (For instance, you can keep a list of characters, places and items, with descriptions and which scenes they show up in. You can also make timelines with multiple character viewpoints, although I didn't do that.) Being able to quickly sketch a scene you haven't come to, and then fill it in later, proved crucial for keeping up the speed. I started to plan before the month even began, although I did not write the actual scenes then, just a few scene names and short scene descriptions.

And of course, I know myself better. This year I finally stepped out of the Romance forum. Despite the two young people traveling together, and the occasional stray dialog like "Hold the darkness at bay with the light in your eyes", it is at heart not about the love between man and woman, but rather the love of the Light. And that is the easiest part to write.

I still don't know whether I am going to write again next year, and if so whether I am going to win. Then again, I don't even know where I will be next year, or whether I will even be alive, though I sincerely hope so. Life just seems to grow more interesting. But it is also harder to write about... at least in journal form.