3357 / 50000 words. 7% done!

I’m playing NaNoWriMo slow this year, because the girls in the basement need time to come up with the next chunk of words. So far, I’ve written in unusual places other than on my laptop, usually making use of my Asus Transformer (I do love it for writing) and Dropbox to sync files seamlessly between Jota+ and Scrivener. (No more SimpleNote syncing for me; the Android clients for SimpleNote suck reliability-wise. Dropbox works like a charm.)

I’ve actually pitched the Snowflake Method out the window. It wasn’t giving me what I wanted, so I’m back to square one. I’ve learned that the example level-1 snowflake is a horrible example, not giving an actual summary of the plot, even an abbreviated one. What is plot? You may be surprised. I certainly was.

So I’m flying blind, apart from a few signposts that I’m gradually setting up derived from Nathan Bransford’s “How to Write a Novel” post. It’s not quick, but it’s less intensive while covering much of the same ground as the first levels of the Snowflake Method. It has the downside of not generating extra plot threads like the Snowflake Method does. I haven’t got a solution for myself for that yet; I’m still concentrating on my protagonists meeting.

What I’ll end up producing will definitely be skeletal in nature. Which I remember a friend of mine pointing out to me the previous year, and I should really listen to her. :)

One of the things I’m going to start doing is to do is try the unusual; where the plot might normally zig, I take a zag instead. Reinterpreting writing prompts is something I’m good at, if nothing else. I’m not sure that this will hold up through a longer work, but it seems better than the alternative of predictable plot. Of course, that might mean that I don’t have the faintest idea either of what happens next.

Which is why the girls in the basement will get time to work their magic.

And I’m going to resist editing as long as possible. It just might work, because I’m going to need to learn to like rewriting. I’m a rewriter, as these successive drafts show, at least where it comes to work that exceeds 1000 words—and there’s nothing wrong with that.