yevlax

The Fetch


I'm pretty proud of myself this week, I did it twice. I won NaNoWriMo. Two-time cham-PEEN.

The first time I did it, back in 2006, I wrote a comedy novel that I had been swirling around in my head for months. It was a mess. In fact, I think it'd be a much more entertaining read than The Fetch for the simple reason that I tried to make sure that The Fetch was an actual, coherent novel....Dragon Bass (2006), is just a mess of inter-related plots that only makes the barest of sense. But Dragon Bass is such a train wreck that it would at least provide fuel for one of those 'ironic reading' parties that people have, where they pass a novel around in circle trying to read the most of it before they break down in laughter. I may never touch it again, except to pass out to people for viewing once I've 'made it'.

The Fetch, as currently written, is actually kind of boring. Oh, there are a few interesting parts, but as a whole it's going to need a lot of work before I even hand it over to somebody to help me edit it. I wanted to write a 'normal' book, from idea conception to compeletion, that put the outline from my head down on the book in skeletal form for my story to improved later. I mostly accomplished that.

I learned that my brain still works. This makes me deliriously happy.

If you've never done it before, writing a 50,000 word novel in the busiest month of the year with more obligations than you can handle is pretty taxing. I would recommend it to anyone who writes, just to try it.

Now do it again, except this time you can't write two days out of the week because you're recovering from blood transfusions and other chemical injections. Mark off a few more days when your blood level is low enough to make your head spin. Mark off another day with your head in the toilet when the meds don't take well.


Now do it for real. No shortcuts like introducting new characters 9/10ths of the way in. No sidetracks that end abruptly and never come back. No entire chapters devoted to fake ads. No stuffing the hell out of your novel with unecessary content at all.

I did that.

That's the first thing I've had to be proud of in almost a year. This month and this project was actually fun. I liked doing it every day that I was able to, I may actually be able to keep this up as a habit now. I have a desire to go back through my older files in my Multiverse Folder and start working on things I've left by the wayside. There's no telling how much longer I'm going to be stuck in thsi decripit physical state. Months? Years? I might as well get some writing done while I mope.

I want to put The Fetch away for a month or so, just to recharge. I'm going to start something else in the meantime, maybe a new idea that I've had chaining off of one of the characters from this, or maybe finish a novel I was working on called 'The Horseman's Last Ride'. I want to spend the next year cranking out some 'book skeletons', and then improving them. I'll forge them over and over again until I feel like I can submit them to agents, and then start hauling them out, and see how it goes. I'm not expecting to be accepted for quite some time, but I'm pretty persistent, and maybe I'll get some constructive feedback in the meantime?

I love this. I love making things again.