NaNo NaNo

I've been slacking in the blog department the last couple of days. I actually wrote one on Monday and didn't like how it turned out, so I deleted it. I haven't updated my wordcount on the NaNo site either, but for a different reason. Every time I have visited in the last couple of days, the site has been slow to load, so I get impatient and move on to another site. (I'll update today, I promise.)

We're a third of the way through the process of this month-long write-a-thon. But am I a third of the way through the novel I'm writing? If my calculations are correct, and of course you will never know if they are unless I tell you at some point, I'm about half to two thirds of the way through the first third of the story. At 35k words, that means the final result will be around 200k words. That seems about the standard fair these days.

I don't hate the story yet. I did go through a day and a half of thinking that my writing wasn't worth the effort, a little lapse in self-esteem. I'm wont to have those now and again regardless of whether or not I'm in the middle of a writing project, so I didn't let it touch the story. I just kept telling myself, "I might suck, but that doesn't mean these characters suck." Well, a couple of them do, but they're supposed to be kinda sucky. :)

My story has three main characters that are alternating telling the story (which at this point is still disparate as they haven't met each other yet). I think the final story will make sense in this format and it allows me much greater control over the pacing of the story. But, I've been thinking that it might make more sense to write all of the chapters from one main characters perspective and then move on to the next and then the last. This is one time that having an outline to work from is to my benefit, as I know where I want to go with each character. I just think that it might be easier to stay in the character's mindset if I'm writing from the perspective of one character day after day instead of every other or every fourth day.

the background of this story lays out a 'world' in which Chinese, Indian and Brazilian culture has surpassed American and Western European as the standard. But it is also a post-national 'world' where the real political power rests with "multistellar" corporations - who maintain there own police forces, militaries, hospitals, etc. Because I have chosen to write a science fiction novel far enough in the future where not only has society greatly changed, but technology as well, I'm inventing a lot of new things, mostly gizmos that will be obvious rip-offs of todays technology. This all means lots of new words - words borrowed from the three cultures mentioned above, borrowed from science, and a whole bunch made up by me. Thank goodness I'm maintaining a glossary as I go.