Nanowrimo: A Summary

[aldersprig]

It’s been quite a month!

Let’s see.

I learned, without a doubt, that I need a lot more practice at outlining Short Stories. My sense of scale is, shall we say, lacking.

Cal - Inspector Caracal - has been a lot of help in this.  Even if some of it is “Lyn? This is a novel.”

My goal was 2

read on…

Comments

[sauergeek]

Some of what you started definitely have a novel-length feel to them. I'm told — never having written anything more than snippets myself — that short stories are probably the hardest of the prose fiction forms to use. (I expect that poetic fiction is harder, but I've never tried that at all.)

Congratulations on vast wordcount!

[kelkyag]

You wrote 65K of (necessary middles and) endings. How is that not a success? What would have qualified as a success in your eyes?

I suspect you've also learned a lot about how you translate your outlines into words, and that when you're ready to take another stab at it you'll find outlining the Rin&Girey stories much easier.

You've also learned that you can write eight novellas plus a bunch of other stuff in a month, so one novella a quarter for the next year should be a piece of cake.

And you have a stack of additional outlines ready to go for whenever you feel like tacking something long form -- or just to keep a series of short pieces on track to a good wrap point. (I hope you'll hold on to those rather than pitch them.)

Done awesome! Go aldersprig!

[aldersprig]

💚 💜 💙

I needed to hear that, thank you.

(And I don’t pitch anything, so they’re still there, waiting, and Cal went over them with me to help me make them more useful for, like, not novels.)

[kelkyag]

Nothing wrong with novels! (And you do have novels you want to write, IIRC.) But it's nice to have an idea of how big the project you're looking at is, and if necessary to rescale and/or reschedule it. Or have a guess as to what to charge for it. :)

Would it be useful to do a rough outline for anything with, say, at least three segments and multiple more-pleases? (You spent a good chunk of October on outlines. Was that useful? Was it worth the time it took? I feel like November's long pieces were better constructed than the things built in chunks far apart, but I don't know if that's a function of outlines or timing or change of focus or ...)

[clare_dragonfly]

Woohoo, accomplished and not burnt out! \o/