Tuesday, November 24, 2009

NaNoWriMo Update #3

There's no way I'll be done with my NaNo manuscript before the end of the month, but I was never going to finish on time, anyway. The book is too long for 50,000 words; right now, it's looking more like 80,000 by the time I'll be done (30,000 words so far), and I want to be done by Christmas so I can have some clean chapters ready to send around after the first of 2010.

Today I wrote "the spy is captured" scene and it was hard not to fall back on the usual hokum in scenes like this, but I managed to keep it tongue-in-cheek with the villain doing his version of the "if that's you real name" joke from Dr. Strangelove. There's a lot of humor creeping into this otherwise two-fisted spy story. It's really become a fun romp instead of grim and dark, but it's not a change I'm totally comfortable with. The characters seems to like it, though. Give them their head, and they surprise you.

I'll have tomorrow to work some more, and then will have no production over the four-day weekend as I'll be suffering the holiday--I mean, celebrating--with my family.

Happy Thanksgiving to you and yours. Remember to be thankful for something, anything. I don't like how the holiday has become a celebration of gluttony and self-indulgence (in other words, just another day) rather than a true thanksgiving of life's blessings, even in tough times like we're going through now. Compared to a Chinese leper colony, we have it pretty good even when it's tough.

4 comments:

  1. Hey, you have a helluva start on your novel. Congrats.

    And Happy T-Day also.

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  2. 80,000 sounds about right for the market. I'm purposely trying to write a short one. If I can't sell it at 50,000 words, I figure I can always beef it up.

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  3. @David, Thanks.

    @Evan, Duane Swierzynski (linked on my sidebar as Secret Dead Blog) turned in his book "The Wheelman" at around 53,000 words so you should be okay, but that wasn't his first book so maybe he was able to sweet talk his way into a short book. :)

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  4. Brian -- Thanks for your comment a few weeks back on Lee Child. I'm going to post today about giving up on reading books. Our mutual friend Evan Lewis has posted my NaNoWriMo dissing comments on his blog. I think 50K words is too short for first novels in today's market. Not true in the days of nice tight Gold Medals, etc., but so it is today.

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