Hi all,
So hi. How are you? I feel like we don’t get to talk much these days – how’s your week?
Okay, to cut the crap, I’m sorry I’ve been gone for…was it 2, 3 weeks? I was so incredibly busy, and it’s entirely my fault that I didn’t look ahead at my schedule and think ‘oh, huh, I’ll probably be too drained to do much more than hermit up in my house for a while, much less spend time on the internet while the stuff is happening.’
So yeah. Last we spoke, camp NaNo was half over. Now it’s fully over and I have some last bits of news!
I won!
I believe my final word count was somewhere around 45k words, which was well over my goal, and I finished a day early! Which is lucky, because it was the day before all the crazy stuff happened. Mostly church stuff like VBS that I volunteered for.
But my story is, as you may have expected, far from over. The most recent development as far as narrative goes is that now my 2 MC’s are finally on the same path! Or sort of – they’re at that uncomfortable spot where they realize that they’re kind of stuck with each other for a while. Soon, they’ll get to know each other better, but for now they’re practically strangers, which is one of my favorite dynamics to write- that weird period where two people are together but don’t entirely trust each other yet. Terribly awkward in real life, but terribly fun in fiction.
WORLDBUILDING:
Other developments. I’ve made a grave mistake in worldbuilding.
Make a world with clocks I told myself. It’ll be fun, I told myself.
Introduce an icebox I said, when I wrote in a clock tower. It’ll be a cool tidbit to anchor the world in a non-typical fantasy setting.
For a bit of grounding, the world that I’ve created has technology from amorphously around the early to mid 19th century. Sort of. I’m not a history buff, but I liked the idea of things like indoor plumbing and the means to refrigerate food and a lack of uncleanliness that could start a plague.
I just spent a good hour or more researching when various things were invented. And I realized – crap. There are a lot more things I haven’t accounted for, which I now have to pick and choose to add to the world. It has somewhat to do with culture – what would be useful – and somewhat to do with what my particular characters would come into contact with. But there are some things that have to be addressed – like if they have toilets, do they also have printing presses? And if so, is there a local newspaper, and if so, how would that affect how quickly news can travel from place to place, and if so, do they also have paper currency, and if so…
Well, you get the point. Technology changes everything.
Cameras, motor vehicles, indoor plumbing, glasses, electricity, printing presses with movable type, freaking guns. I spent so much time trying to figure out how old guns worked you guys. I had to figure out exactly what kind of gun would be appropriate for the vague time setting I’m setting this world in, and then I had to try to understand the basic jist of it. Turns out, we’re mostly looking at flintlock guns, which basically means handguns that are extremely too inconvenient for the type of fighting that most of the combat sequences require, so it turns out there won’t be that many guns in this book and gah…
At least I know what a flintlock gun is. And no, I’m not going to explain it, mostly because I barely understand it myself. Google it for yourself.
In all honesty, it’s kind of exhilarating to write a book in this new setting. Technology changes things in the narrative and opens doors that I never would have been able to utilize in a more typical setting. Branching out of your most comfortable element really makes you have to sit down and actually have to do some old-fashioned worldbuilding. I’ve been thinking about so many little details of the world that I previously just waved away with more typical tropes, and I think it’ll make the world itself that much more rich.
CURRENT STATS:
Word Count: A grand total (including content from before NaNo) of 71,429. Which ah…I hadn’t been really tracking since NaNo ended and now I realize is kind of insane and out of hand. I keep thinking that can’t be correct. The program I use to draft (Evernote) doesn’t give a word count for a whole project, just individual files, so I’ve been totaling up word counts by chapter as I go. I’ve double-checked my math many times, but…71k? It doesn’t feel real.
Narrative progress: Honestly, I’m not sure. I’ve gotten to the second main beat of the story. The first was my MC #1 being sent to her field, and the second beat is when everything goes wrong just when she felt like she was getting used to her new field. I think it’s a comfortable middle for the book, but there’s still a lot of ground to cover. We’ll see.
So there you have it. Goodbye Camp NaNo. Until next year.
And have a lovely day, you guys! Congrats to anyone else who won! I’ll see you again soon. 🙂
-Abigail
Grey Tea Books 