NaNoWriMo Update

My ambition for this November was to do a "double" National Novel Writing Month, with 50,000 for Thresholder and another 50,000 for Doomsday Pivot!, a system apocalypse type story. This is just an update on how that went, in case you're curious.

For Thresholder, I assume no one noticed. There were some great chapters in November, in my opinion, and the final word count was 53,733. Nothing really to talk about there. This covers everything from the final part of the fight with Natalka to present.

For Doomsday Pivot!, I didn't reach my goal. I had written 30K words for it in October, so was shooting to have 80K total by the end of yesterday. Instead, I have 72,959, for a shortfall of ~7K words. If I borrow some words from Thresholder and pretend that the goal was 100K combined, that still leaves me with a shortfall of ~3.2K words. If I pretend that the goal was 100K across everything, including some projects that are likely never going to see the light of day (primarily Full Meta vol. 2 and Kensuke Fucks the World), then I made it with room to spare. Hooray!

But this post is more to talk about process and stuff like that, rather than give you a word count for a story that isn't available to read.

So, to start with, Draftober went pretty well, even if it was a fairly hard push in terms of writing. The combined drafts actually had a pretty substantial word count, and if you add them all up, I think I actually came relatively close to hitting a double NaNo in October too. As I said, I wrote 30K words of Doomsday Pivot in October, so it was already well under way by the time November hit, and it was just a matter of keeping it up.

How'd It Go?

The goal for Doomsday Pivot was to write something that's a little more of an upbeat power fantasy, in the hopes that it's maybe a little more marketable. I have pretty broad tastes, and like upbeat power fantasies from time to time (as I think you could probably tell from my writing), and as an experiment, this is only really costing me some time.

Overall, I'm happy with what I have, though there's a long list of TODOs accumulating, and they're going to add to the word count without actually adding more chapters. Some of them are easy like 'this character should be described when they're introduced' and some of them are difficult like 'there should be a cohesive link between these two sections'. I think I've found the characters and just need to go back and hit their central points a little harder in the beginning, and hopefully this approach of having a whole bunch of story written will prevent some early installment weirdness.

One of the conceits of Doomsday Pivot is that there are tons of different classes, and part of what 'sparks joy' for me is having them all be their own brand of weird, off-kilter magic system, which leans into something that I really enjoy. I initially just wrote up a long list of these, then wrote up a separate list that tried to move from a thematic base, and in the end, just went through and added every one that's mentioned or referenced into a spreadsheet, which I think is the better and more sustainable approach. In theory, if you mention "oh, this person had long fingers for some reason, but we were driving and I never understood their deal", then in two dozen chapters you might come across someone whose character class revolves around limb extension, some kind of stilt master or long-strider or something.

Similarly, there's a concept of 'sectors', which I'll be borrowing some of the stuff from exclusions for, or which will at least see me working on something with the same DNA (that DNA being from something that I enjoy). At least a part of this project has been about finding all the stuff that's fun and just going full tilt with it. Lots of neat fight scenes between people with wildly different powers for that reason, I think, though there are only something like five of those written so far.

So I think I'm learning something about what the process of writing this for a million words would be like, and setting myself up for later, which is good. Very early on, I made a ten book plan, something that could run for a very long time, and I've made some alterations to it as I've gone. All that has been firmed up, which is good.

Overall, there are a lot of edits to do, but I'm happy with it, and even in the state it's in now, it's readable. All plans are on course, which mostly involve 1) getting a 'first big arc' done, 2) editing what I've written 3) sending it to beta readers 4) revising based on feedback and 5) finally pushing it to patrons (that's you!) and getting it on RoyalRoad.

Burnout

I wrote most of Doomsday Pivot November words at the start of November. I was feeling good, I was doing writing sprints, and it was all flowing. Toward the middle of the month though, I had a few schedule disruptions (my son got sick twice, Thanksgiving, a big party for my mom's 70th birthday) and the wind went out of my sails.

I have a blog post in my drafts folder about burnout and how it's actually a bunch of things, but this would be the type that I tentatively call 'headspace' or 'momentum'. I can still write without momentum, it's just harder, and there was definitely a point in the last week where I thought 'okay, I just need to sacrifice videogames, reading, and push really hard, and then I'll be able to make the goals I set for myself'. And then I would think 'meh, don't really want to'. I didn't push it, because I think part of how burnout arrives is through a depletion of brain chemicals, and just like working out when you have an injury that needs to heal, it can be a terrible idea.

I don't think that I'm burned out on Doomsday Pivot, but it's been a bit of a break now, and I don't know how long that break is going to go on before I pick up the pace again. There are a lot of things that I can blame not making the word count goal on, but I'm going to blame it on 'writing stop to ensure that I don't have burnout'. I'm thankfully stopping at a place where I think it's going to be easy to continue from, but this is where I'm at now.

Finishing

I don't have a firm timeline for any of the proposed next steps for this project, but I need to get back into writing it, which might just be in the form of two 45 minute sprints per day on it, which should be something like 2K words per day. Put that way, it doesn't seem too bad, but there's a reason that my output on Thresholder is only about 12K words per week, and managing the brain chemicals is a big part of that.

If I have more updates, I'll let you know, but the next one will probably be the one where I start actually posting chapters.