I was all set to write a post about how I recently dove back into last years NaNoWriMo project, when I realized that I never went into either of the two stories I have worked on for NaNo. So I guess I will have to recap them.
Rogue: I used to play Dungeons and Dragons when I was still in High School. While playing, I made an attempt at making my own little campaign world. I had tons of characters and histories to help flesh out the world, but I was a fairly sucky dungeon master. The ideas were shelfed, mostly forgotten, and eventually totally distorted from what they had been. (talam, my more common Internet pseudonym is short for Talamarius, which was a main character.) So it is hard for me to think about this story without thinking in DnD terms. Rogue is set in the same world, more-or-less, and follows a thief named Gibson. In trying to strike out and live his own life, he ends up taking over the quest that caused his mother to leave when he was still a child.
Canisters: The story revolves around Daniel. Also, split home and on his own at an early age, Daniel owned his own photography studio in the basement of his house and taught classes at the local tech school. He lived with some friends who worked at the studio and help pay the bills. The story has two parts going on: one is Daniel's messed up family life with a father who hates him, a mother who has disowned him, and a step-sister he doesn't quite know he is in love with; and the second is his suspicions that one of his roommates has killed someone. This one keeps moving away from what I had intended, which was heavily about the death, and is becoming more and more an awkward love story. I expect by the time I am done, no one will have died, and the single image I have in my head that has been driving me will become a memory.
Now that I have recapped, I have been toying with Canisters a lot the last couple of weeks. I retooled a couple of scenes to make them just a little more believable and help support later chapters, and I added another three chapters, including the chapter that has been in my head since the beginning. I have two chapters I need to finish up, one I left unfinished months ago (chapter 7, so far) and the one I was writing last night when I passed out. Then I am kind of stuck unless inspiration takes over while finishing those two. If chapter 7 ends like I think it will, there will be a gap in the story between it and the next three written chapters and another between them and the end. But until my fingers decide what actually gets typed out, I don't know how big of a gap there will be, and what will go to fill that gap.
Still thinking in terms of NaNoWriMo, I don't think I am going to hit the 50k mark before I am done writing. But, honestly, who cares? I will just be happy to get it out and complete. I can work on fleshing it out more later.
