I didn’t mean to end up as a rebel this year. It just kinda… happened. My first novel concept completely fell through, none of my backup ideas had enough substance to become a novel, and even my idea to write a mini-anthology of related short stories fell through. I had to do something.
So I ended up going back to one of my old NaNo projects. The 2013 one, specifically. Not a great year for my health, but it was my first year as ML, and the theme was that fantastic 8-bit setup. I digress. I’ve long felt it’s my most salvageable out of all of my manuscripts, and I’ve always meant to come back to it. With nothing else to lose… here I am.
I spent early Sunday morning at Perkins reading it over, and I’m quite impressed with it. Even the scenes I thought would need to be totally scrapped are actually quite passable, and more important to the novel as a whole than I remembered. Sure, there are two main characters who need to have better characterization so that they are more distinct, separate characters. And I’ll have to ret-con the employee who went from a fellow trainee to a seasoned coworker halfway through, to fit my needs. Probably he’ll get split into two separate characters. Aside from that, though, it’s quite excellent. …well, also, I need to actually write out the ending sequence. Minor details.
I find it interesting that my most salvageable manuscript, the one where the inciting incidents and climax lead up to a conclusion which is actually reasonable for the main characters to solve themselves, is also the one manuscript where I knew the ending in advance. I can’t help but think these two facts are related somehow.
At any rate, I’m a rebel now. My word count is now equal parts new written words, and fake calculated words based on editing work. We’ll see how the month plays out.
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