"Joy, Relief and Sadness"

Feeling pretty well, thanks!  Just a tiny bit sad, though.  I’ve enjoyed writing these blogs, for one thing, and for another I passed 40,000 words about mid-week.  At that point you realize you’re going to make it, you’ll be a finalist, you’ll have that precious first draft in your hands!  It’s strange, but some of the fun goes out of it at that point.  Maybe I’m just an adrenaline junkie after all.

And how’s Elsie?!

Elsie and I have both (subvocal growl) survived.  She’s doubled in size from when Diana found her.  Here’s a picture of us playing chess.  She plays better than I do, which isn’t hard.

Word count:  47,076 as of Saturday night the 23^rd.

Last week you mentioned how you’d struggled with descriptive passes regarding the interior of a remodelled ballistic missile submarine. Have you researched this since? Or is fine-tuning this being reserved until after November?

I did a little research, yes, but I didn’t want to do a lot.  One can easily be distracted by the fascination of the hunt – all too easily! -- when you’re supposed to be writing.  I did try a couple of different searches in Google Images.  I found a few pictures that were useful but not terribly evocative.  It may be that, given potential security issues, there might not be much out there to find.  The fine tuning will have to wait until I start editing, anyway.  There’s going to be a lot of that needed!    

Your biggest triumph this week:

The climax of the story came together better than I hoped it would, both in terms of the actual event and the plot problems I hadn’t exposed before.  For example, there’s a bit of a narrative gap at the beginning of the scene, and the character of Major Collins needs a lot more development to make the scene as written more plausible.  And, as I discovered early in Week Two, I haven’t adequately visualised the drive and control systems of the Grissom.  This is great news because all the problems I’ve seen (so far!) can be fixed.  Roz Morris made a spot-on comment to one of my earlier posts about the necessity of rounding out minor characters; that’s the sort of thing I’m talking about, rather than major holes that require one to rethink one’s entire premise.

And the bit that has made words harder to come by: 

For me it’s inevitable that the idea I begin with mutates or evolves once I start writing.  The story you thought was so concrete is revealed as something far more nebulous.  This is a good thing, because until you see that you won’t be able to bring the story into focus.  However, it also engenders doubt and uncertainty.  You can’t necessarily write it the way you initially planned if you see something that just won’t work.  The problem is that one thing might affect any number of things downstream of it.  The doubt and uncertainty about those downstream problems make me hesitate: “Should I write this?  If I do, what about that?”  Or more often, “What the devil do I do next??”

In terms of the idea evolving and making the writing more difficult, I’ve come to see that Voyage isn’t an “action” novel, at least not in the way I understand the term.  It’s a lot more about interchanges between the characters, characters figuring things out about the events that occur, discovery of things they didn’t know, about the mission and about themselves.  I wouldn’t go so far as to say Voyage is a “whodunit” but there are definite elements of that.  However, my strength as a writer is action.  I like to write action scenes and generally, going in, I know what I want or need to do, both in terms of the scene itself and the words I put on paper.  So for me, the sort of scenes I find my characters in during the first part of the story are difficult.  On rewrite, I’ll be alert for a descent into exposition, “telling” instead of “showing.” 

Talk to us about your ending. Are you excited to be writing it? What’s the biggest challenge you think you’re going to need to overcome to get there?

I have several ideas for the ending, most of them revolving around the actual rescue of Jack Baumer.  You may perhaps have wondered why, if the working title is Voyage of the Starship Grissom, the ship is spending most of the book enroute to Mars.  The Grissom gets to Mars, only to find Jack Baumer isn’t there.  It shouldn’t be hard to figure some of the places Jack might have gone – and where the Grissom and her crew have to go in turn – to earn the designation “starship”!  As to where that might actually be,  I have a good friend who is also a SF writer, Marianne Dyson, who gave me some great suggestions based on current planetary research about which of the nearest stars are thought to have Earth-type planets.  Tau Ceti E is a prime candidate; it’s known to have an Earth-type planet in its so-called “Goldilocks” habitability zone.                                   

Hopes for next week:

I’m going to try for a final word count somewhere between 55,000 and 60,000.  From there I think I can extend the second draft out to between 75,000 and 80,000 words.  And for everyone else coming down to the wire, good luck!  You can do it!

 NaNo in a nutshell (week three):

Joy, relief and sadness that it’s almost done.

For more on NaNoWriMo and to follow our other writers, please take a look here.