An Untimely Update...

Well, I "won" NaNoWriMo at the end of November, though I didn't take the time to mention that on here. Of course, I didn't take the time to mention anything on here, so...oops. Anyway, I do want to get back to updating this blog since I find I have hours and hours at work where I'm really not doing anything but staring at celebrity gossip stories on the internets. Probably ought to do something productive, eh? Don't worry, I do perform the duties of my job, it just turns out that I don't really have the aptitude for secretarial work. I tend to finish all my work really quickly, but then do not feel motivated to seek more out. Secretarial work is really more for people who don't know how to multitask, I think. But that's not important. Back to NaNoWriMo (which is a dumb name, I know)...

To "win" NaNoWriMo, one must write 50,000 words in the 30 days of November. I didn't quite manage the full 50,000 honestly, so that's why I wasn't entirely proud to announce my "win." I think when all was said and done I came up with about 30,000 usable words. And now I just need to get back to working on adding to those (and editing). My novel really isn't too bad, I don't think, though it is probably a little boring and character-driven. I do have a plan to include a horrific fire set by the son of a major character as a homicide attempt; I just haven't gotten there. But that's action, right? :-)

Okay, I seriously promise to write more in this space in the coming months as I get back to writing novel #1 and move on to future projects. I guess this is also me committing myself to finishing novel #1 and moving on to future projects. I would actually like to try writing some poetry; I used to write angsty teen poems all the time when I was in high school, and I loved poetry a lot back then. When I got to college, professors told me that they didn't understand what my poems were about, so I decided to stop and work on writing in complete sentences. Haha.

NaNoWriMo

So...I decided to go for it and start a novel on November 1st! The happiness this project is bringing me is somewhat puzzling and certainly unexpected. Could I actually have been meant to be a writer all along? I don't know...I don't really write the kind of quality material typical of honest-to-goodness Writers (with a capital 'W'). But I really am having fun. Seriously. So weird.

Anyway, I just thought I'd take a break from my 5,500 words (oops...I'm supposed to be somewhere over 8,000 by now, but I'm trying not to fret) to make a note on something that's bothering me about my story so far. This is the fact that I started in a sort of flashback period, expecting this to last only a chapter, at most. But now I'm into the third chapter (yeah, these are Dan Brown-length chapters...suck it), and still about 8 months away from what I was considering "the present." And I'm tired of summarizing, so I started writing dialogue between characters to keep myself going. Is this okay? I was only planning to start my characters having conversations once I had caught up to "real time." Hmmm...I'm just frightened that dialogue within someone's description of the past seems really goofy. I mean, no one writes word for word dialogue in their diary, right? So would a narrator really recall entire complex conversations from 8 months ago? Doubtful.

I assume I'll just press on and continue to allow my characters to converse with one another -- it just feels so wrong! Oh well, the point of NaNoWriMo is to JUST KEEP MOVING, and that's what I'm trying to do.