Guns & Magic

Invisible Prey by John Sandford.

 

-David

A quick review of my Nano 2006 post-mortem shows that I cranked out 61K words that go-round. My 2007 effort resulted in “only” 51K words.

 

So…hitting 60K words in one month is a goal I’ve already hit.

 

How did I forget that???

 

This doesn’t change my plan for November any. Though I feel slightly more confident than I was before. Which is good.

 

The only thing that changes is that I no longer have 2 “experiments” active in November (60K words *and* “winging it”). Just the one (“winging it”). That seems safer. Somehow.

 

-David

 

-David

I grabbed a book at random from the library earlier this week. I made it less than 25 pages in before sending it back to the library.

 

I think I’ve gone through that routine about a dozen times this year alone. I stopped bothering to list books I spend so little time suffering through.

 

This time, though, I figured I should enunciate why I stopped reading it.

 

The shortest/easiest explanation is: It was badly written.

 

But that’s … generic. Doesn’t tell me (or anyone else) anything. So here’s my stab at being more speicific.

 

First, the opening chapter was a collection of short fragments, each one from a different viewpoint with no immediate connection between them. Not in itself a great sin, but it wasn’t executed very well. The fragments were too short. Just a character name usually and some short piece of inconclusive, uninteresting action. And there was almost always one sentence that was from a different viewpoint, or was straight up “telling-not-showing”. One sentence, sure, but there were sometimes only 10-20 sentences in a section, so it stood out.

 

Second, character motivation suffered with the short treatment. In particular, the first (short-lived) villain went to the extreme of “stupid” (I’m sure the author was going for the extreme of “evil”, but it wasn’t evil so much as that infamous hobgoblin “needless consistency”), seemingly out of nowhere, seemingly only too serve the plot.

 

Third, plot elements almost had yellow PostIt’s attached: “Inciting Event”, “Villian Motivation”, “Dark Secret”, “Former Lover”, etc.

 

Finally, the dialog was as uninteresting as the supposed action.

 

In short, there was almost no evidence of actual writing craft within the first 21 pages. So I said, “Fuck it” and found something else to read.

 

-David

Everybody Kills Somebody Sometime by Robert J. Randisi.

 

-David

With 2 50K Nano wins under my belt (2006 & 2007), I’ve decided to shift my target a bit and go for 60K words in 30 days. I’ll “settle” for the normal 50K win, though, if I have to.

 

Also, I’ve decided that this go-round I’m not putting in a lot of time preparing. I had detailed outlines for both of the previous efforts. For 2009 I’m just going to “wing that mother” (in the immortal words of Steve Dallas).

 

My lack of plan boils down to this:

 

As before, I’m planning to write only 25 of the 30 days of November. I’m going to take off the last 4 Sundays of the month (there are 5 this time) and also take off on Thanksgiving.

 

We’ll see how it goes.

 

-David

Airships by Barry Hannah.

 

And I’m working my way through Gurps: Supers at the same time.

 

-David

The Dancer from Atlantis by Poul Anderson.

 

-David