Purpleness!!

The penultimate day of NaNoWriMo dawns bright and early with my alarm clock bleeping its head off at 6am. My arm promptly keeps on snoozing it until I become aware it is semi-daylight and I've missed my bus to college by fifteen minutes. Oops. On the other side, I feel rubbish and have been ill all weekend, and I only have one lesson, so I make a quick guiltless phone call to my college attendance monitor and then promptly go back to bed. Having not slept much that night, I sleep right through until 2pm-ish and feel extremely lazy and unproductive.

Knowing I have a media essay to write today, too, I get started on Nano. Sadly, there is nobody around to war with me; my regional chatroom has three people in it, none of whom say anything in the fifteen minutes I wait for some kind of answer to my feeble 'hi'. Facebook also proves rubbish in provinding me with a warring partner, so I decide to go it alone. Jamming headphones into my ears I squeak up the volume of James Blunt and The Script's new albums (my novel's writing mix) and attack my novel's key scene (the midway point!!).



In this scene, my MC, Will, finishes his fight with his brother by finding his 'true love's grave in the field where they are fighting, and in a mad panic, time-travels back to her time. The following involves a near suicide, lots of running, snow in July, two revelations, a enormous paradox and a whiskey in a tavern (not in that order). I must say, it was all terrifically fun to write and now, I leave Will at 50k, lying in his sister's bed (nothing vulgar) with more bruises than bones, his brother actually being nice to him for once while he's interrogated by his irate sister for time travelling after he faked destroying the watch that allows him to do so.

Geeee, I want to keep writing now . . .

However, back on track. Finishing a day early has been wonderful, especially considering the amount of stress this has all been this year. My coursework is in serious neglect . . . O.o I highly recommend the experience to anyone who struggles with first drafts (you write a hell of a lot of rubbish, but hey, it's out there and written) and longs to write that novel. The breaking down of your inner editor is hard, but satisfying.

I have 50k with which to find the first half of my story in (oh believe me, editing will be brutal this December: most of it shall not live to see draft 2) and I hope to continue to the end through December and January. This story, I hope, will be much easier to write and redraft than my other NaNo Novel, Hamartia . . . which, despite being my baby, is an utter pain to edit and plan. >.>

As a last note, though, congrats to all those Nano winners out there, great dedication, and best of luck to those who have yet to go green/purple, I'll be rooting for you tomorrow! However, as I write this, I am actually meant to be word warring with a friend who, by the end of this war, will also be a purpleite . . . time to get typing. Toodles, people! (or just Kanen xD)

"You cannot map a desert, for it is breathing."

A travelling man with straw hair gave me a map
of the desert and later turned out to be a hallucination.
the map contained my feet, bare and blistered,
as spots in sector A7, though I felt a rock nearby
would do better in blue than dried-out green.

I ask the map for names, though it cannot trace her
contours or find the water she cups in both hands,
and it tells me she is a desert with the syllables
of her name spoken with every step gravity rejects.

Sometimes the night tells me I’m going west
and other times it tells me the horizon awoke
in the east or south-by-north, lost in its own compass
because they forgot to turn the highway lights on.

In the daytime, the sky moulds to her curves, shaping
a horizon from twisted rhymes and broken poetry.
Planes (like pilgrims) find their wings clipped,
feathers dropped into watercolour tattoos
for artistic licensing, and nothing more.

Somewhere in the weedy fictions that populate
my mind, I see her lying belly-up, breathing
like the sun will melt her skin and make her as sand,
the sort that sweeps between the sable doily skies
and hugs a new landscape, turning it yellow.

I could tell you the nursery rhyme I first heard
from her lips; of a travelling man who never knew
her name, burning in the sand and passing on
a map that rewrites itself too slow and leads
me around in circles until flames follow my feet.

Weekly to-the-death Duels

My novel started with one, and I figure, it will end with one if I get to the ending. I'm currently just past the 23k mark, which is like wow because I've never been more than 1.5k ahead on Nano in previous years (and only or like two days before I got lazy), so now I'm waiting for my coursework to be set and my nice cushy buffer to disintegrate under the pressure. :S

But progress s going well. My MC, Will descovered time-travel a couple nights ago, has followed himself to the duel that started the story, thinking he's either completely wasted or been cursed by witchcraft, and is now sat in a London pub having a pint with a conspiracy theorist in 2006. His sister will kick his arse tomorrow, though, when she finds out he's still travelling, tut-tut. Getting excited though, lots of fun and explosions and stuff, not to mention a romance (O.o) to write.

. . . 50,000 words is seriously too short for a novel. I think I either pad too much or my characters like long-winded-ness.

So this is my day 10 update, I'll keep it short and sweet because I still haven't written anything today.

NaNoWriMo Kickoff Rant!

Woot, so yeah, I know this blog was intended for poetry and musings and stuff, but novelling is my better area, I feel. I've been debating what to do this year for weeks; the previous two years I've done Nano, I've worked on the same story, and now that story is at a point where it need's a serious going over rather than a slap-dash speed-writeup, it's off the cards for this year. I've also been working on a short story, but I intend that one only to be about 20/25k long, which still leaves me half a Nano. So I decided to throw in an old children's story to rewrite.

However, I have this character called Will, who I use in this wonderfully awesome idea called a Character Chatroom on the site www.teenagewriters.com and he's from a story I started in 2008 but never really did much with as I had too many different ideas for it and I wasn't able to research it properly. Buuuuut, I've been getting to know him through these chatrooms and now he's been coming up with his own background and character and all sorts (including a four-day argument with his brother in my head >.>) so, I thought, with some help, I could write his story instead of the children's rewrite . . . However, my novel of the last two years has also been getting back in my head and the characters begging me to write . . .

[Fully aware I sound insane right now]

So figuring this out's been hard, but I'm stuck on the short and Will's story now (though Will's story seems to have turned into a prequel to the actual story I vaguely started two years ago) and my other novel's being forced to shut up and sulk.

Ahem, soooooooooooooooo. Rant over, I'm so glad nobody reads this blog. :)