NaNoWriMo 2014: From Heaven To Hell/Hydrena

Time for another story about a story idea!

When I was maybe 13, 14, 15 years old, I spent a lot of my time on a website called FictionPress.Net, posting stories and talking to people in the forums. The site users used to start informal writing competitions among themselves, and I took part in two. The second is irrelevant (at least for now), but the first involved starting your story with a short passage which ran thusly:

"Stop, you thief!" Panting frantically, I ran down the escalator from the heavily puffing security guard. I clutched the pack of cigarettes tightly in my hand as I made my jump to freedom – crashing into someone. I looked up to find myself staring into a Goth boy's green eyes.

I'm not sure if this was from something, or if the girl who started the contest just made it up; if I've just infringed some sort of copyright thing, I didn't mean to and I'm sorry.

From this passage, I developed a modern fantasy story about a girl who discovered a new world and a new race (by means of the green-eyed Goth boy, who was a part of this race), and ended up having to confront Death himself, and I called this story From Heaven To Hell. I made it up as I wrote it, so the plotline was a bit dubious, and what kind of character gets transported to another realm by some guy she literally just ran into and doesn't ask where she is or what the hell just happened, I don't know. But it was one of the few stories that I actually finished at that age, and despite the fact that my two main characters didn't have much personality-wise (much like the rest of my characters - guess who couldn't be bothered with character development when they were 14), they stayed with me.

I mentioned in my post about The Dragon Story that I have a habit of merging story ideas together, and so when I realised during the early stages of planning Barnabus' Balloons that I would want some sort of magical race in my story, instead of creating a new magical race, I decided to steal the one from From Heaven To Hell, thus linking the story ideas. I also mentioned that I had created a network of sequels, prequels and companion books. Barnabus' Balloons is to be the first in the main series, which will consist of four books, and From Heaven To Hell, which I am renaming Hydrena while I rewrite it during this month's NaNoWriMo with a better plotline and more developed characters, is to be the last, while The Dragon Story is to be the third. I am also planning a prequel and have numerous over ideas which I may or may not ever write.

So Hydrena - the rewrite of From Heaven To Hell - is what I am writing at the moment. We are ten days into NaNoWriMo now and unsurprisingly I am very behind (both with writing and with my uni work, but that is neither related nor the point). You want proof? Fine.

However, I am not the only one doing NaNoWriMo at my university, and we have got permission to have an overnight write-in at our library soon, so as long as I don't continuously forget to write until then, I should be able to catch up. :)

Language Is Magic

I've been at university for a bit over a week now, and started my Linguistics with German degree course two days ago. At the end of the seminar I had today, our group was asked: "why do you all want to study linguistics? What about it makes it interesting to you?"

When I tell people I'm studying linguistics, many of these people ask me: "what languages?" They assume that they know what I am talking about, but they forget, or maybe don't realise, that there is more to a language than knowing how to use it to communicate. Linguistics is the scientific study of language as a concept, from phonetics (speech sounds and how we make them) to sociolinguistics (how social factors such as class, sex, age and ethnicity affect the way language is used) to syntax (the structure of sentences). But things like that often don't cross people's minds. After all, they have been speaking their language for years; what more is there to know?

That's why I find linguistics interesting. Those of us who, for example, can't programme computers know very well that we can't programme computers. But not many people know just how much they don't know about the sentences they build and the sounds they form into words every day. It's like a hidden science, it's like a secret society. You don't know it's there until you really stop and think about how you don't need to be psychic to place images in other people's heads, you can just put one word after another in a specific way and providing that they speak the same language as you, they can rebuild the image in their heads just as you described it to them.

And the person doing the describing doesn't even have to be anywhere near you for them to communicate that image. You can make little inks marks on paper, and these little ink marks have the power to take strangers on journeys around the world, to inspire them, to entertain them or to break their hearts. You don't need magic to cast a spell on people; you just need words.

If you think about it, all language is is a load of sounds, and all writing is is some funny squiggles, and yet we can understand them. And we take it completely for granted; we don't know how we do it, and we don't even think about how we do it, we just do it. Doesn't that say something amazing about the human brain? Because nobody told you how to put a sentence together, but you still know how to do it. Well, you say, it's just common sense. So does that mean that you were born knowing that the adjective goes before the noun (eg, "the sneaky fox")? Does that mean you were born knowing that it makes sense to say "the fox will hunt the rabbit" but not "the fox will the rabbit hunt"? If we were all born knowing these things, then why does the adjective come after the noun in French, and why would "the fox will the rabbit hunt" be a perfectly grammatical sentence in German?

Language is a mystery but that doesn't stop us using it every day. Language is powerful and strange, but language works in so many ways we don't understand, and personally I don't understand why anyone wouldn't want to find out all it's secrets.

Post "The Secrets The Dead Keep"!

I've been meaning to write this post for ages.

So! I finished the first draft of my novel! At eighty-five thousand, one hundred and thirty four words, it is the longest thing I have ever written. I finished on the 30th of August and by the 31st of August, had it edited and formatted sufficiently to send off for my free proof copy offered by NaNoWriMo and Lulu.com. Unfortunately, the "free" bit didn't cover shipping, and the cheapest option is also the longest to deliver, so it's doubtful it'll arrive before I go to university (cue sad face).

After finishing Camp NaNoWriMo, I abandoned FocusWriter and instead solely used yWriter5, which I HIGHLY recommend. It is very useful for keeping track of scenes and chapters, making it considerably easier to manage long documents such as novels, and it is pretty easy to export to Microsoft Word files all in one piece by messing around with the Export Project/Export Selected Chapters options in the drop-down menu under "Project" in the toolbar on the top left. I only used it at its most basic, not bothering with the Characters, Locations and Items settings or even using the Goals, so it has far more potential than I give it credit.

Unfortunately, I haven't written much since finishing Barnabus' Balloons (I can no longer remember the reason I gave it a code name as opposed to just using the actual title I've given it, so when I get my proof copy with the actual title on the front, I'll post a picture). I have been considering writing a ten-chapter story based on my favourite band Within Temptation's latest album Hydra, with a chapter based on each song on the album. I've also been thinking about the sequel to Barnabus' Balloons, but the ideas for it haven't taken hold of my heart just yet. The story idea that has taken hold of my heart, however, is a prequel, set a few hundred years before Barnabus' Balloons, but in the same fictional country, documenting the life of the first Queen as she struggles to right an unjust and warring world. Alternatively, there are other ideas I've been thinking about writing as well, that are too unformed for me to really be able to talk about them just yet.

So basically, I'm at a complete loss as to what to dedicate my time and effort to next.

Post CampNaNo Update

With a few exceptions, I have managed to write at least a little bit every day since Camp NaNoWriMo ended. Having a daily word count goal to aspire to during Camp has improved my motivation to write; plus, I've reached 50,000 words in my novel, so I feel I might as well finish the damn thing. Right now, writing is going a little slow, but I'm determined to get to the end eventually.

One of the Camp NaNoWriMo prizes is a free hardcover proof copy of your manuscript through Lulu. The deadline for this is the 30th of August so I'm aiming to finish my first draft and do some minor edits (spell checking and things like that) before then. I've also been looking at the template that you use to format the manuscript to send it off for printing, and it's a little complicated, so I'm glad I've started doing that early, before I've actually finished the whole manuscript.

I am SO CLOSE!!!: Camp NaNoWriMo final week update

With one day to go, it is more than possible that I will reach my goal. Needless to say, I am very excited. This week has been a very good week, mostly because of that one day that I managed to write 5,000 words. Without that, I would never have been able to almost catch up. Today I have written a little more than 4,000 words, and I am going to write more. I am nowhere near to finishing the story itself - I keep telling myself that I'll keep this scene short, so I can get to writing the next scene and move the story on a little faster, but I can't seem to stop myself from trying to write well and add details. Nonetheless, I'm nearly there! I can't wait to finally reach that 50,000 words. :)

Camp NaNo Update: Week 3

Target word count: 37,096
Current word count: 27,932
Current chapter: 12/13

I'm still woefully behind - further behind than I was before, in fact - and starting to feel like I'm running out of time, but I'm sure you'd rather hear the good news: I've found my motivation! I'm enjoying writing a bit more now, and what I am writing is flowing a bit better. Despite having gotten past the halfway mark in terms of wordcount, though, I'm nowhere near the halfway point in my story.

Nevertheless, I shall not give up!

I'm going on holiday tomorrow, and it's really crept up on me, so I'm rather busy and unfortunately probably won't write anything/much today. Maybe I can catch up on the place at 6 tomorrow morning... Also, I'm not taking my laptop, and will be continuing writing on a different laptop. I'm going to miss my own laptop. As for the software, I was about to spend a paragraph explaining the problem I've been having trying to transfer the yWriter5 files, but while writing this post, I've been tinkering with it and I think I've worked it out (in fact, there may be two ways; I emailed the developer an hour or so and just got a response, with a solution that's different to the one I just thought of). I'll talk about that separately, though. As for FocusWriter, attaching the file to an email didn't work (apparently there wasn't an appropriate program on which to open the file or something, even though I downloaded FocusWriter on the other laptop) but simply copying-and-pasting worked. The customised theme I use on FocusWriter for writing Barnabus' Balloons was easy to transfer, by exporting it from the theme menu-thing, emailing it across, and then importing it.

Anyway. Back to last-minute-packing, trying to work yWriter5 and writing, methinks!

Best. Pep Talk. Ever.

One of the reasons that it's better to do NaNoWriMo or Camp NaNoWriMo than write a novel in any month of the year is the community feeling of I'm not writing alone, if all these other thousands of people can do it then so can I. Another reason is the weekly pep talks.

Yesterday's, I think, was particularly brilliant. The idea was a personalised pep talk: you were given a list of things to think of...

1. An awesome superhero name
2. Adjective describing your main character
3. Your favorite snack
4. The last verb your main character enacted
5. The manufacturer of your favorite snack
6. The first piece of dialogue in your story that starts with 'You...'
7. Your current word count
8. Adjective describing your inner editor
9. Adjective describing your best friend
10. Your favorite supporting character in your Camp project
11. The last piece of dialogue in your story that ended with an exclamation point
12. How much time you last spent writing
13. Your favorite mythological creature
14. Your favorite author
15. Write a sentence beginning with the words "Once upon a time"

And then you inserted them into the pep talk in the appropriate numbered gaps. This is what I ended up with:

Once, there lived a writer, known throughout the lands as (1)The Authoress. This writer was seized by inspiration one July, and struck out to tell the tale of one known only as "The (2)Determined One."
The first two weeks were full of wonder. Fueled by (3)chocolate digestives, the writer generated conflicts like vast thunderstorms, and characters so real they jumped off the page only to (4)write you right in the face. (5)McVities, now aware of the crucial role they played in this writer's story-spinning, swelled with pride and told the writer, "(6)You can't leave me housekeeper-less, Kerla!"
Alas, not all was so rosy. After hitting (7)20,854 words, the writer remembered their last pang of doubt. What if they became blocked once again? What if their story was silly? Maybe… maybe it would be better to stop. They looked into the mirror, and the face they saw seemed almost (8)stupid.
At the writer's darkest moment, a/an (9)awesome voice arose. "Hey, you can do this," it said. "If you don't, how will we ever find out what happens to (10)Felwin? I don't want to live in a world with that kind of empty hole. Don't stop now."
The writer nodded, saying "(11)I can't just leave it! No matter how far away from my word-count goal I am, I promise to write for at least (12)the majority of the day a day."
With that, a rainbow sprang across the sky like a (13)dragon racing toward the newest novel by (14)Kristin Cashore. The world seemed to hold its breath, waiting for the writer's next sentence. The writer smiled, took a deep breath, and wrote "(15)Once upon a time there lived a dragon called Hubert who was a very misunderstood dragon..."

Credit goes to Tim Kim, (Camp) NaNoWriMo's editorial director, for the writing of this pep talk.