I Wrote a Novel Last Year...

Firstly, some administrative notes and such. This particular blog was born on 09/09/09 because I have been meaning to find a nice central place to put my blogs and the day was just a nice one to pick. I may move some or maybe most of my older posts over from other places where they reside, ideally dating them when they originally were published (on the Ning) as it seems that might be possible. Since I didn't really do any blogging this summer, I have as a goal to do somewhere between one post a week and one post a day. So far that hasn't worked out quite as well as I had hoped, but really nobody to blame but myself for that. I should be adding my List of Books Read posts sooner or later.

Well, onto the heart of the post. I decided to participate in Relay for Life for the first time last year [well, last April which was last school year]. I had been hearing about it for a while, but didn't really know what it was all about and never really felt motivated enough to find out. I decided to join the National Society of Collegiate Scholars (NSCS) team participating for the first time in the event. It was in Drake Stadium at UCLA (go Bruins!) and there were tons and tons of people there. To sum it up, the experience was a blast, I ended up staying awake the whole time, met a lot of cool people, rode the emotional roller coaster and helped raise over $120,000 for the American Cancer Society. After that, I decided to get involved for next years Relay for Life.

Relay for Life at UCLA is put on by the Colleges Against Cancer club. The club has events year round focusing on cancer education, advocacy, survivorship, and of course raising money for the American Cancer Society, mostly though the Relay for Life event. With that in mind, I joined the club this [school] year. Everyone in the club is assigned a committee which focuses on various tasks throughout the year and for the all important Relay for Life event in April. Tonight all the members learned about their committee assignments and got to meet their team. I was assigned to the Outreach/Sponsorship Committee, which mostly works towards securing donations for Relay. No easy task in these unstable economic times, but I think we'll do well. On thought was to try contacting alumni and see if they would be willing to help out either with donations, forming teams to participate in Relay or even just spreading the word. We will start working on that in the next few weeks.

Wondering where this is going? So, when I met my fellow committee members, we introduced ourselves and said one interesting thing about ourselves in addition to the standard name, year and major. I was the only Senior present at our little introduction. Anyway, my interesting thing was of course "I wrote a novel last year." I didn't mention the part about writing it in a month or how I decided to write it the day before. I just said "I wrote a novel last year." I always love the way people react to that. I get a little thrill whenever I get to say it, which isn't all that often, actually. I am of course referring to my National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) novel, which was officially done at 77,721 words (but I've since added more.)

So yes, I decided quite spur of the moment to participate in NaNoWriMo last November. I signed up on Halloween with a vague idea of what I would write about and just started writing on November 1st. It was the ultimate discovery writing exercise. Which is also one of the problems with it. My first novel needs lots and lots of editing. To be honest, it probably needs a complete rewrite. For one thing, I am fairly certain one of the main character's names changes half-way through the novel. I also ended up doing a ton of the world building during the first week or so of writing, so there is a whole lot of telling and not much in the way of showing going on. I also feel that the novel needs something else to really make it work. I decided to make it a YA novel, but have since learned that YA really means characters about 13-17 years old and not my slightly older 20ish protagonists, apparently.

In broad strokes, my first novel is set in India, but not really an India we would recognize today. (Don't ask me why it is set in India.) It is a post-apocalyptic India of the future, something like a few hundred years at least. An ecological disaster and a few other things have conspired to kill off much of the world's population. The novel is set in a world recovering from that disaster. A world full of some awesome technology (did I mention this is a Science Fiction novel as well?) Oh yeah, there is a nice threat of impending death for the Earth as well in the form of a giant asteroid (or was it a comet?) Right, there are also aliens involved which may or may not survive a rewrite. Oh, and the novel is also a response, in some ways, to John Green's Paper Towns. So you have my young protagonists dealing with growing up under the threat of impending death and also dealing with how to imagine others complexly.

Part of the problem is that it likely tries to do a bit too much for a single novel. It doesn't help that I kinda sorta didn't plan out chapters, or indeed even write things in chapters per se. Mostly I did separate scenes each writing period (1-3 hours a day, usually, for 20 something days, since I skipped a few days around Thanksgiving, when I got sick.) I suppose these scenes could be turned into chapters, but it would take some work. Also, I don't remember now if I split things into paragraphs, but I must have. It has been a few weeks since I looked at my draft, but I must have. Word also ate my day's work several times during the month, so quite early on I transitioned to using Google Docs to write. I also saved each day as a separate file and then added it to a master file as well. I only had to rewrite 5-6k words, and was lucky enough to merely have to type them out again from the corrupted files. Although some of the times Word freaked out and tried to eat my file but I was able to recover the file through Word, I ended up with some scrambled and missing lines. Still finding a few of those, even though I though I had fixed most of those right after the incident.

So it was a major process for me. I still really don't trust word. Likely it will all be written in Google Docs, then saved to a Word file and then probably even emailed to myself in a Word file. I got to be pretty paranoid about that. Which reminds me, I have been meaning to reinstall Office in the hope that it will stop Word from trying to eat my writing. Back to the novel, right now it is sort of just sitting there, waiting for me to do something with it. I have a though about a complete rewrite, which will probably focus more on the characters and less on the SF elements. It would be a pretty ambitious re-write, especially given my perceived experience as a writer (I consider myself to be still very much a novice). I really want to step back from the novel and try to sink my teeth into something a bit different.

Which brings me to this year's NaNoWriMo. I've decided to take a more measured approach this year. I came up with the basic framework for my next novel over a month before November. I plan to use October to get my thoughts down and have a nice foundation from which to launch into some serious writing in November. So far I haven't really done as much as I would like with that, but the month is still young. This next novel will be a paranormal YA novel (more on why YA interests me on a different date) focusing on a yet to be named female protagonist. I already have a nice magic system mostly fleshed out and the basic plot more or less figured out. I want to have a nice structure to work with, but also want to have some flexibility to work with new ideas that come up during the writing process. Hopefully this approach will make editing a whole lot easier and produce something that looks more than vaguely like a novel. We'll see.

Stay Awesome,
Chris Hall