08.06.07
Three Months Left
About this time last year, I started thinking pretty heavily about what I was going to do for my 2006 NaNo project. Naturally, Real Life got involved and I wound up canning the project three days in. However, this year looks to be different. So, I started going through some of my old idea files in order to get some inspiration.
Last year’s idea was very heavily influenced by Air, actually, which is probably why I elected not to use that as my project. I’d taken the basic premise of Air and put my own spin on it to a certain extent– a strange boy comes to town and meets a young girl, and all sorts of odd things happen around the two of them. It wasn’t a harem idea, it wasn’t a horror story, and in the end the twist was probably pretty predictable. I still have the outline and chapter synopsis sheets somewhere in my idea folder (I might actually go so far as to typing it up and putting it in the Basroil’s idea-file folder) but it’s not exactly an idea I want to stick with.
That’s the key problem facing me right now; I have so many open projects and so many seemingly-promising ideas that it’s hard for me to choose what to concentrate on. I still want to take a few weeks and do up a C#/XNA demo game, but I’m deterred by the fact that I want to finish the Netjak project first (though I’m making considerable progress on that of late). And I want to keep working on Metal Rogue, but my attention gets taken away by the fact that I’m less than enamored with the next few plot points, I’m afraid of getting writer’s burnout so close to November, and whenever I do want to write, it usually is of pretty low quality of late.
Now, that said, I do have a plan for NaNo that is practically foolproof. My writing blitzkrieg from the end of February produced almost 20,000 words in almost three solid days of writing. As a result, short of disasters or journeys, I’m planning on inhabiting random Panera Breads every single Saturday and Sunday of November, writing non-stop. My problem wasn’t that I lost interest in the ideas, it was that I got complacent, saying, “I’m still on track here, and I can take a break for some gaming here and oh look seven hours have passed and I’ve not written anything more”. Besides, I actually liked sequestering myself with my outline sheet, and the creativity I showed in just getting something down on paper was remarkable (to me, anyway). If I’m lucky (and I stick with it and actually keep writing after 50K, as opposed to Incon which got dropped for months after I hit the goal), I may actually have a completed story done at December 1st.
So basically, the plan is to do as much gaming and slacking off between now and the end of October, so that November’s free time can be a writing frenzy. In that regard, I’m already ahead of schedule.
Incidentally, I would use Metal Rogue as my idea for NaNo ‘07, but I’d actually much rather keep that one separate, as I’d rather not have that one feeling rushed. Also, I want to give a shout out to a particular friend of mine who is starting a work of his own– nonfiction is hard, man. You have a lot more patience than I do for the whole “fact” thing. Of course, making stuff up isn’t always easy, either…
Catch you tomorrow, folks.