NaNo-ing

As you've no doubt noticed, I'm doing National Novel Writing Month yet again. I just threw up the code for our stats/word counts over there to your right. Not the most impressive of numbers, but give us time.

I'm more than a little surprised at the direction my novel's going. FOr most of the year, I'd been playing around with a Comedic Science Fiction idea, and despite some great help from readers a few months ago, I decided I just couldn't pull it off. Then I veered into a Nick Hornby/Jonathan Tropper direction, but that one again, fell apart in the planning. Somehow, I started something that touched on urban fantasy, and then became just good ol' fantasy. Surprised the heck out of me. I'm really not sure where I'm going with it, honestly, but I'm having a blast finding out.

I wrote a fight scene tonight--first one since college. This one was far superior to those, but, ugh. I've got a long ways to go there. It was pretty fun tho. I kept fighting the temptation to mime out certain moves to make sure I could describe them correctly, but was pretty sure my co-worker would've labeled me insane (or more insane), so I kept it to the brain. Also tonight, two characters I've been working on for a week were finally introduced, which was a relief. Sadly, when I got to their grand entrance, I'd forgotten their names. So that derailed me for 5-10 minutes. Their new names are pretty cool, and at least one of them is easier to pronounce, but man, I'm gonna be trying to remember their old ones for quite some time. Note to self/other writers: jot stuff like that down. Duhhhhhh.

Frodo's the only one of The Offspring that's taking the plunge this year. The others are plenty busy, and probably a bit demoralized by not being able to finish in year's past. I think next year, I'll give the Princess a nudge again, I think with a little effort on her part, she'll be able to produce something, she just needs more practice. Samwise is clearly not a writer--at least not in his mind, and that's fine, his creative interests are directed elsewhere, and it won't be too long before he'll be writing little ditties (and maybe some long ones, too) instead of stories. Frodo, meanwhile, is writing something very new for him--the last couple of years he's written two adventure/superhero stories in a series, and this year he's going for more of a semi-autobiographical, slice of life kind of thing. The change is doing him good, it's a lot of fun to see his skills develop. Sure his word count is low, but in a week or so I expect them to skyrocket.