The TLDR
Results: 27570 words
Status: failed
Honestly, I am not broken up about it. I don’t think the story would have panned out to be more 40k words in the first place, since what outlines I have for exPATRIOT stories are more Cadet Flight Methuselah-esque in nature—novella-length or shorter episodes that are stitched together, rather than straight novels. I picked it because I felt like writing it, not because it was a guaranteed win. And now I know what its issues are going to be.
27k is 2/3 of the way through the outline, and while have no doubt I can wring 50k out of it by going into full lore-dump mode, Sand’s not a super descriptive character by nature. She’s a very literal person who sees something, goes down a list of things until she reaches “yep, checks out,” and continues on her objective without questioning much. I’m not sure that would make for the most interesting of stories, at least from a standalone perspective.
Which is why I have Shi and Gear there, both of whom are far more introspective and analytical. So, the story needs more from Shi’s perspective at a minimum if I want it to be a “novel”. Plus I need to do some more work fleshing out the exact nature of her abilities.
Timeline’s solid, though. I did not realize I made a spreadsheet of it and all the characters right down to the month and day of every major event, but I did! LOL
SQUIRREL!
I also had a major episode of “SQUIRREL!”—compiling and laying out the revised family cookbook after I realized the beta version of Scribus would let me do some stuff the stable version (as of November 2023) won’t.
So, I may have diverted about two weeks of writing time doing that (I also located the MIA half of the zucchini bread recipe in pictures I took of my grandmother’s copy of the original cookbook, so I feel extra accomplished), while undertaking the annual Cookie Baking Marathon with the husband. Thanksgiving week is always a wash either way, but I didn’t plan on also sinking time into book formatting. Which is an overall plus for me, because it was all fun times. 🙂
We shipped 30lbs of cookies each to our families this year. It was bonkers. And so was the queue at the UPS Store. Props to those clerks, and the owners who came in to help them. They were absolutely slammed with weird shipping requests when we showed up (one of which was freakin’ hilarious but took a half hour to fulfill because there were so many individual packages—someone was an absolute troll for Christmas this year XD).
And I’m sorry, but I wasn’t about to haul 60lbs of box back to the truck and come back tomorrow. I’ll stick it out in the 30-minute queue and watch the holiday shipping shenanigans unfold. WORTH IT. 🙂
The NaNoWriMo.org Shitshow
And now we come to the shitshow of NaNoWriMo.org’s child grooming saga.
There is a long writeup done by Meg Dixon on Newsbreak (which seems to have been memory holed as of this post), but the first I heard of it was the APB put out by the NaNoWriMo board via email (which are reposted in Dixon’s writeup, as they’re login-walled for the rest of the world). The same information (mostly) is up on Know Your Meme, which is probably the point when you should know you done fucked up.
I’ve never participated in the NaNo forums, but to be honest, the news wasn’t surprising. And… I’ve thoughts on the whole thing. There’s another post for it.