Nano Update: The Sequel
Once more into the book, dear friends: Black Forest is an unregistered nano novel whose progress can only be tracked by your reporter. I picked up the gauntlet of the nanowritmo in the hopes of pushing the manuscript. Now it’s pushing back. 20,000 words complete with 6 days left. 30,000 words short of the goal. Looks like Butler University is a basketball superpower, I don’t know who J-Fed is, it didn’t rain yesterday, and Google vaulted over 500 dollars per share. I have more excuses somewhere, a long list, a short list, a revised short list and a Final Four. 30,000 words in 6 days? We’ve seen that movie.
I’m happy with the progress. The other day I was working on the book finishing the last of the opening scenes and I began to doubt that the structure I’d planned was going to work, that Part One, the bridge to Part Two wouldn’t stretch across the tme line divide. I ignored the voice in my head and kept going only to realize that the first half of the novel dovetails into the second, eight years later, without jarring the story. This method of writing is called wandering through the desert until the oasis is found. My nano goal wasn’t so much to write a novel, but to write enough story to see if a novel might be in there somewhere.
Do my opening 130 pages need rewriting and editing? Sure. But not yet. I want to push it to the end and see where it goes. The ending I envision will probably morph into something unexpected. Meanwhile nano is a motivator to forge ahead.