The Land of Literary Abandon

I know I'm competitive, sometimes I think too much so, but that's me. So when Mike started talking about the writing challenge during November I got sucked in too.

You can go here to read the details, but the basic idea is that around the world during the month of November, aspiring writers are challenged to write 50,000 words of fiction - a novel. No one has to read it, and the focus is genuinely on quantity versus quality - just WRITE. Coming into this a bit later than I probably should have, I don't have a sketched out plot line, or outline of chapters, etc. Which is how *I* would have liked to do this. But as those involved with NaNo are aware, the biggest hurdle to finally sitting down and actually writing that novel we all say we want to do is to just WRITE.

So, the focus is on word count. I have no intention of ever trying to submit what I'm writing to be published (well, at this point anyway) so that also frees me up to not worry about the plausibility of the storyline as it unfolds. It is challenging to forget about grammar though and I'm doing some editing along the way - can't go completely out of the box on this one.

Since I didn't go into this with a planned outline, my story is evolving as a series of scenes that I write as they come to mind. I have a general idea for the story of course, but the particulars - nope, don't really know. Because I'm me, I'm more focused on relationships between crew members in this story (Trek story!) and not so much on their mission. I have to throw in a distress signal, some civil unrest on a new Federation planet and all that, but that's not really the fun part for me. 

But as I get further and further into the story, I'm thinking I need to take a step back and sketch out an overview - timeline if you will - of the story as I see it right now.  It's already getting challenging to remember where I left Kirk or Sulu!  As this thing grows to over 100 pages, it's not going to be easy - or very efficient - to be looking back and finding that I left Chekov in the bathroom for 3 days or something. 

The story takes place shortly after the events in the latest Star Trek movie - Kirk has been promoted to Captain and assigned to the Enterprise. The crew we all love are together on the ship and getting to know and respect each other. Since this takes place in the alternate reality, there are all kinds of possibilities. Uhura and Spock are especially fun to write - who knew?? :-)

Because it's Star Trek a lot of the dialogue just flows - we all know Uhura is going to say "hailing frequencies open"; etc. but they do sometimes carry on other conversations. Really, they do!  I'm trying to actually picture the characters saying the lines I'm writing for them - I feel like I know these people sometimes so that's not too hard.

So that's my life for the next 27 days. I'm at about 7,500 words - 15% - and am writing every chance I get. I know there will be days when I'll be away from my computer (perish the thought!) so I'm 'stocking' up on that word count whenever I have a chance.

As a friend posted recently, "Write On!"

Comments

[Mike]

So my character, Larry "Snakebite" sits down for a little internet surfing and finds an interest blog post about an aspiring Trek writer, and the story quotes the entire blog. Thanks for the free word counts.... hahahahhaha eat my electron dust baby!