NaNo

As Week 2 of NaNo draws to a close, I’m happy to be on target with 24,000 words on the page. I would have liked to be a little further ahead of the line, but hey, I’m here and I’m working. There have been a few days when I couldn’t seem to get it together. Life sometimes conspires against you with appointments and commitments and then sometimes there are just too many distractions between the television, the new dog, and other things.

The story is progressing well. I’m feeling the need to introduce more blood and a greater threat, but that could just be because I’m cranky. The story pace is too “level” and needs that rollercoaster feel. I think this can be done by writing the bad guys in. While I’d added two small chapters initially, I feel that I need to add more of their anger and violence. This will probably be my late afternoon task. A few quick notes about what I want to do with these two rotten men and how and where to incorporate them.

The plot/timeline is a mess already but I’m holding true and not going back to edit. I’m just making notes in a different color in the body of the manuscript so I don’t forget to take care of the issues. Not self-editing is the single hardest thing about NaNo. I find it painful to know that the errors are there and to leave them. My inner control freak is feeling extremely stressed over this.

My house is in the usual shambles that comes with Week 2. I haven’t vacuumed or mopped and the dust buffalo have multiplied and grown exponentially. Until today I haven’t really cared. I’m allowed to ignore those things in November. At least until I can’t anymore. I’m there now, so I’m going to run the vacuum and bathe the stinky dog and try to corral the dust buffalo. I need some order around me so I can manage the next two weeks.

Onward!

Week One of NaNo is in the bag for me. I might get in a few more words today, but I kind of doubt it. I finished the week with 14,500 words. The real struggle is not going back and editing anything. Trust me, not all of this is good. But NaNo isn’t always about being great. It’s about letting go of your inner editor and just writing the story. Mine has already taken a turn or two and introduced me to a couple people I hadn’t known would have voices. Those bad guys are creeping me out.

I was extremely productive early in the week and I’m glad I made headway then. There’s a reason you write as long and as hard as you can when you can. It’s because there will be days when you may not have the time or opportunity to write as much as you want.

Friday was one of those days. I woke up early prepared to jump into a fresh chapter with both feet and I just knew I was going to get a lot done. Then Mr. Scott came home from having coffee with a friend and told me about an ad he’d heard on the radio. The Humane Society was offering a special on older dogs. We decided to go look.

The only senior dog wasn’t available for adoption due to an ear infection. But there was a two-year-old girl that stole our hearts. It was a moment of serendipity. I have a cat named Boo. I named her for Boo Radley from Too Kill a Mockingbird because she hid behind the door the first time we turned her loose in the house. We came across Scout this morning and when I double checked the sheet, I saw she was a female. And she had the sweetest smile.

What are the odds of finding a sweet girl named Scout to live with my Boo?

Now what are the odds that Boo and Scout were going to be instant buddies? Yeah… it was a couple days of introductions, over-excitement for the dog, and hurt feelings for the kitty. We’ve got a long way to go.

Meanwhile, I’m just trying to get the words on the paper and not self-edit. Let’s hope the pets and the characters in my book cooperate.

Question: What if you know nothing about the politics of South America but you want to use a nefarious government plot involving some South American country.

Answer: Too easy. Switch from Jack Daniels to a nice Malbec from Argentina and Google the snot out “current political issues South America.”

Seriously, one of my favorite parts in prepping for a new book is the research. I pick the subject and then start reading. In this case, I’m looking at risk assessments both political and financial. Once I pick a country or an idea, then I take the broad swipe for that locale. Sure I start with Wikipedia. I need it dumbed down just as far as you can—it’s a starting point for the lost and confused. Once I have an idea of where I want to go, then I branch out.

One of my favorite resources is the BBC news links. They often provide information is small chunks with links to the common questions. So if you’re looking at Columbia and you want to know who ELN and FARC are, you’ll usually see that in question form and can follow it to more information.

The major problem with doing this is that you can blow through a bunch of hours and get way off track. But you have to read a lot so you can condense it into a coherent paragraph. Readers want to have a clue, but they don’t want to read a damn Wikipedia entry with links. All they want to know is how and why this is relevant to your story. Unless your readers are into Tom Clancy or Robert Ludlum, they don’t want to get bogged down in geo-politics. They want:

“Fred was being hunted by the Green Spider Organization. They were a group of murdering slugs from outer-Slobovia and Fred had pissed in their Wheaties when he killed their mascot during a raid.”

Only you, the author, cares when and how the Green Spiders came to be and the implications of them invading Modesto, California, to hunt down Fred.

Anyway, I was going somewhere with all this… something about liking research…

Oh, yeah… I got it. So, I spent the last six hours reading about politics and war in Columbia and may have come up with something plausible for the story. And if I didn’t, I’ll just pick another country… maybe Argentina. It’s all about the Malbec.

Is there anything scarier to an author than a blank page?
Define scary. Like being shot at scary, alone at midnight when you hear a noise in the house scary, or gas station sushi scary. Those are the editor type of scary.

Fear of the blank page isn’t really a problem for me. I think it falls under the annoyance level of things. Like fasting before bloodwork and finding a line at the lab when you get there. The page is just someplace to document the BS that rolls around in my head. It may hold a grocery list, a letter to a friend, or a great story idea. It also may be the repository for the garbage that I need to get out of my head.

Story ideas are a bit like those pre-printed grocery lists. I don’t need coffee every time I go to the store… wait… that’s a bad example. I don’t need flour or eggs every time I go to the store. But they’re on that pre-print list for the time you do need them. I have a list of story ideas that I’ve thought of over the years, but most of them are just that—ideas. Without characters and plots they aren’t really anything:
Girl meets boy
Fish out of water
Damsel in distress

Only mine are more like:
Embassy guards that are special ops – Girl meets boy
Musician/murder witness has to be stashed on a ranch – Fish out of water
Genealogist being stalked by crazy biker hitman – Damsel in Distress

They became:
The Embassy Guard
No Safe Haven – coming soon
A Shared Fear

For me, it all comes down to finding the right connection between people and plot. None of these were fully formed concepts when I started. They were ‘What if this happened?’ concepts.

The other day I thought about the female lead and tried to find two things that would work together: a job and a reason for that job to have put her in danger. I don’t want to write another cop—the last two standalones are cops and they’re a lot of work to get right. While almost anyone can be in danger from something they saw, I just finished a ‘witness in danger’ book, so the next person needs to have been caught up in something at work. Finding something different and interesting is where the issues occur.

Plus, it needs to be plausible… yeah… always an issue. I now have a character, a job, and a reason for her to be in danger. That’s a concept and I can now work out the plot and the timeline. I’m seven days away from NaNo and I’m hopeful that I’ll have the plot worked out by then.

Now comes the scary part—actually writing the damn thing. Onward!