Yay, I won NaNoWriMo 2007!

50834 words of fiction in November.

And I did it without a plot!

Chapter 5 was (except for scene 5 with Mindy and Noopie) a slog to write. I averaged about 350 words per hour. It came out mostly okay, I think, but it was no fun to write. Bleah!

Chapter 6 (coming soon) was a different story altogether. True, it was a slog like Chapter 5. And like Chapter 5 it was no fun to write. But unlike Chapter 5 it didn’t come out mostly okay. It came out poopie. True NaNo-quality poop. I’m struggling to adopt Katster’s cheerful admonition to “embrace the suck!”

But given that it sucks, I may as well embrace it, eh?

Scene 2 in particular went awry. I started writing it, hated it, set it aside, and wrote scenes 3 and 4 instead. When I came back to scene 2 I realized that it the logic of the timing was just plain wrong. So my characters lamented that I had made them so stupid—and I included their laments in the scene and abandoned it.

And then a murkle happened. I decided to interview some of my characters. That turned out to be really fun, really fast, and really interesting. I got 4000+ words of juicy stuff in under four hours. I didn’t know I could write that fast. And Dan in particular has some real attitude that I didn’t know about. I think (I hope, at least) it’s going to make writing him more fun in the near future.

So that’s that. Chapter Six: no fun. Interviews: wicked good fun.

Now: on with the show.

I’ve posted Chapter 1, Scene 1.

Sixteen of us started writing at midnight in the back room at Java California in Dixon. We had “reserved” the room for two hours, and most of us stayed and wrote until 2am.

I finished my first scene exactly at 2am. I’m delighted with what I wrote (though I probably can’t trust my judgment at 3:45am). And my word count is 1504, which is just about my usual for a two-hour session.

A bunch of us will meet tonight from 7–9pm at a local coffee shop for the first of our weekly Thursday night write-ins. I expect that my next scene will take the full two hours and net another 1500 words or so. We’ll see.

So far, so good!

Still no sign of a plot…

My NaNoWriMo novel this year was inspired by an idea posted by roefactor on last year’s NaNoWriMo “Adopt-a-Plot” thread:

What if everyone started living the same day over and over again, but, unlike most situations, everyone knew about it?

I’ve adapted this marvelous idea slightly:—

On August 10, 2008 at 2:39 am GMT, the universe reverts to the state it was in on August 8 at 9:28 pm GMT. Then on August 10, it happens again. And again. The universe is stuck in time loop that lasts 29 hours 11 minutes. Only one thing transcends the resets: consciousness. People retain their memories through the time loops.

That’s nearly all I have to start with. I currently have no plot and no characters. I do have a scene or two in mind to get my fingers moving. And I’m starting to flesh out some of the social, political, scientific, and religious implications of the time loop. All of that speculation has yet to yield a single plot idea, but this is NaNoWriMo, so it’s okay if I have no idea what happens next.

I start writing in a secret cave in Dixon, CA, along with a gaggle of other Sacramento NaNo novelists, the instant the clock strikes November.

Comments welcome. Last year I didn’t want comments as I wrote. I had a moderately developed plot in mind, and didn’t want distractions. This year, I have no idea what I’m doing, so feel free to offer comments, questions, suggestions, and encouragement.

Just for fun I ordered a few printed and bound copies of Jeremy Comes Home. I used a self-publishing company called Lulu.com. You send Lulu a PDF or other file of your book, and they’ll print and bind as many copies as you want. If you want, they’ll even make it available for sale. This year Lulu made an offer to NaNoWriMo winners: Send us your book by January 16 and we’ll print one copy for you for free.I missed the deadline, but ordered two paperback copies anyway, one for me and one for my sweetie. The price was just over $8 per copy, plus shipping.

You can either design your own cover art or choose from Lulu’s gallery of about 150 stock backgrounds. I found a stock cover I liked well enough. It’s hard to gauge the age and gender of the person in the picture, so let’s say it’s a 12-year-old boy.

The books arrived on Thursday. They’re nicely bound, and the cover looks great. I hadn’t read any of Jeremy since I finished it on November 30. Thumbing through the book has been a nice surprise. There’s a lot in it that I like, and reading it makes me want to start the rewrite.

I’m not making Jeremy available for sale on Lulu. I’m hoping to find a publisher for it, and publishers tend not to like previously published material.

Now that I’m done with the first draft, I’d be happy to hear any feedback you want to offer.

I’m especially interested to to hear what important bits of information I missed. Is there anything you wanted explained that didn’t get explained?

The big one for me is: What happened to the police?

All other comments are welcome, too.

With that latest bit, I’m over 50,000 words. That means I’m a NaNoWriMo winner! Yay, me!

And congratulations to underpope and jenfullmoon (two thirds of my readership) who also won this year!

Yay, us!

Well, that felt pretty good once I got it rolling.

NOTE: Ish. Too much talk talk talk. And too much of the talk is on the telephone.

Bleah.

But the next scene I want to write is also a telephone call. Harumph.

Maybe it’s time for an electromagnetic pulse bomb.

Whoops. When I posted Chapter Four, I posted only the last half of the chapter. I’ve fixed it, so now the post has the whole chapter.