I’ve been spending some serious quality time with my NaNoWriMo project. While I’ve NaNo’d in the past, I’ve never been this serious about it. Sure, I didn’t start with an outline and used NaNoWriMo as an excuse to just go out exploring an idea that started out as simply “College of the Gods.” Originally I had a grander, properly novelly idea—King Lear mashed with As You Like It in spaaaaaaaace—but this idea seemed more accessible, and with a 50k month sprint ahead of me, accessible sounded like a good idea.

And I think it still is a good idea. I felt brave enough to leap in, at least after a few days of warming up, and now I have 39,875 actual words to mold, which is 39,875 more than I started out with.

The draft being developed right now is nothing like what the final story will end up being, and I’ve been seeing vast changes take place with the characters and the plot (now plural) and the world I’m building. Like the cracking of a baking pan of brownies, there are now discrepancies between chapter 1 and whatever chapter I’m on now (I’m writing scenes in a timey-wimey fashion at the moment to meet word count, so “chapter” is a bit fluid).

So I thought, what an excellent time to write a vignette between the three main characters (three! And not just one main character and sidekicks!) that

• captures the themes (my gods, themes, I haz them) of the novel,

• clears up the motivations of each character (really, really important, since this will describe their trajectory through the story),

• sums up the personalities, virtues, flaws, backgrounds, and relationships of the three, and most important of all

• adds to the overall word count.

I couldn’t have written this vignette three weeks ago. Because I actually got around to exploring this story, I’ve been able to develop a much better idea of how the narrative will work. It’s far from perfect sight as to how everything will go, but without NaNoWriMo, I wouldn’t have gotten this far.

The hardest thing to deal with is that this vignette is so different from the current style of the manuscript; it’s done in three first-person viewpoints, whereas the manuscript is done in a kind of vague hand-wavy third-person that attempted to concentrate on one deity in each section. The rewriting phase is going to be prolonged and a bit violent to the version 0.0 of the text.

So! Um. Here’s the vignette, which is actually a sort of story trailer, now that I think about it. I’ve had my Mac read it to me and everything, so the cadences sound right for each character’s head space.

Funny. I thought the first serious book I wrote would have more explosions in it (you wouldn’t imagine how many explosions there were in King Lear As You Like It In Space, which had an outline and notes and lots and lots of planning and… never got there. Maybe another NaNoWriMo).

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