Hey! I Think I See a Way Out!

First things, first, announcements!

Don't forget to watch the new episode of Stargate Universe tonight on Syfy at 8 pm CST!!!

There's a new episode of Riese:  Kingdom Falling up today.  Check it out here.
 

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Wow, I am having a hard time believing that it already the week of Thanksgiving.  Where did my November go?  Oh, wait, that's right, I spent it writing.   Mostly.  I mean, yeah, I sort of remember some other stuff sneaking in there, but mostly it was just writing.

Now that we're past the two-thirds point of the month, I thought I would give you a little "state of my novel" entry.  I remember saying after the first week that I thought I might be able to actually finish my story (or at least hit my 50,000 words) by November 20 or 21.  Well, clearly, that hasn't happened, but mostly because life kept getting in the way.  I have broken 40,000 words though, so I have no doubts that I will hit the 50,000 mark by or before November 30.  Whether I actually finish my story by then, well, that's another matter entirely.

Heh.  Remember when I was agonizing that my story might not even lend itself to 50,000 words?  Silly Past Me.  The more I wrote in this world, and the more I stopped to sit down and actually build this world, the more ideas I came up with for what was going on in the story.  I think I may have actually tried to do too much.  I've got about three possible big final conflicts, that, ideally, would all happen and play nicely off of one another.  In reality though, I think I am about to have to pick one and write towards that conflict and wrap up the story.  I would like to figure out a way to do that without those other plot points just fizzling away into nothingness though.  So right now, my primary goals with my story are:

1. Start ending the story.
2. Wrap up what can be wrapped up.
3. Provide plausible reasons for why what was left hanging was left that way.

I have so many cool ideas that I have been kicking around that I fear I am just going to have to leave be.  But, I am making sure to take notes on them.  Maybe if I write another story in this world, I can work those in somehow, and provide resolution to the unresolved issues from this story.  As I am sure you can imagine, since I've come up with so many new ideas while writing, my story has started to stray a bit from that shiny outline that I sat down and hammered out back in October.  Granted, I tried to leave that outline slightly vague in the first place, because while there were some specific scenes I envisioned that needed to be included, I didn't have the entire story worked out beyond where I wanted it to more or less go.  So, I am not completely off the rails, but I am getting to that point where I haven't referred to my outline in a while, and I am just a teensy bit scared to look at it and see what I've totally left out and how much I've veered from my original plan.

Not that veering is a bad thing.  An outline is just that, an outline.  It's a set of steps, a path, if you will, for your characters to try to follow over the course of the story.  But just like any path, there are forks, and detours, and you can't always know where or when those will crop up.  Sometimes you just have to leave the established road and hope that you end up where you need to be, whether that's where you thought you were going or not.  I honestly have never really been big on using outlines in my story-writing in the first place, so I am really not surprised that this one has ended up not dictating my every scene.  Still, just having it has been more than helpful, especially when I would find myself stuck on where to take my characters next.

I do think I need to sit down and do one more review of my outline, and of my story notes, and then compare it to where my story is right now.  From there, I am going to make new,  retroactive outline of what has actually happened, and what there is left to do, and hopefully I can bring this puppy home.  As I've said before--starting stories is never something I've had a problem with.  Finishing them, well, that's my challenge.  That's why I am doing this.  But, that means that I have now officially entered the hard part of the process.  Whee!

I do have to say, I truly am really really glad that I decided to participate in NaNoWriMo this year.  The reason I started this blog back up was because, in not writing regularly, I really felt like I was missing some crucial element of me, and doing this, as stressful as it has been at times (self-imposed stress is still stress), has really made me feel so much better about myself than I have in a very long time.  I've learned something very important about myself this month.  Writing is in my soul, and writing stories, whether they are excellent, or complete crap, or even unfinished, is something that I need to be doing on a regular basis. 

Of course, so is playing video games, apparently.  I am just itching to jump back into that particular part of my life.  Finding a balance between that and story-writing should prove an interesting challenge, but as we start to close the books on this year, I feel like it is one I am up to.

I have been debating with myself over which game to pick up and play once I finish my story, and I think I have chosen Kingdom Hearts.  It is the "great unfinished" challenge in my video game playing history.  I have started this thing so many times.  Seriously, I've been trying to beat it since 2002 or 2003.  (Look, I have never once said that I am a good video game player.  This game was actually one of my gateway drugs into the pastime, and I have leveled up considerably since then.)  I had already decided that 2011 was the year that I was finally going to finish it.  But, in the wake of setting a goal and finishing a story within a given period of time, I am wondering if it might not be possible to actually do the same with this video game.  If I could manage to beat it before the year is out?  Well, that'd just be the icing on the cake.

Word Count Update: 42,116 out of 50,000