NaNoWriMo 2009

I'm doing NaNo again after a year off, and I think my novel this year is just going to be pulpy fun. I'm writing a Private Eye story where the PI used to be a professional wrestler. The inciting incident is that one of the people he used to work with comes into his office and wants him to look into the overdose death of one of the performers.

I'm already having trouble with the fact that I know so much of the terminology of the business, but need to explain it to the reader...so I have a decent gimmick that I think works, but I'll probably toss it out with the first edit. It's actually a pretty commercial plot and story so I'll be working on the edit and and “novel pitch” through December so that I can start sending it out early next year. I'm also going to spend more of my “working at the minimum wage theater job” time editing the first zombie novel, as a lot of people who have read it REALLY like it.

I tend to stumble when it comes to putting together packages to try and get my work published. I mean, I had a few short stories published in small magazines here and there through the years, but when it some to novels....well, I suck at getting them to a publisher. I'll write more about that as the month goes on, because it's r4eally weighing heavily on my mind...and while I probably have a couple of connections I could get help from, I tend to just...not.

Oh, and just so you know, self-publishing a novel is NOT one of my options. I refuse to have my prose be part of a vanity press. Weirdly, I have no problem with this being done with comics (like when the webstrip has enough strips to be formatted into a book). Maybe it's because Dave Sim made self-publishing comics seem more legitimate than going through a publisher, and maybe it's because most self-published novels are self-indulgent bullshit.

One of the people who works at the movie theater found out that I do stuff like this and said that at one of the other local theaters in the chain has a worker who had a novel published...one that gets relentlessly negative reviews on Amazon. I don't know who it is, but oddly enough, that just spurs me on to try to get published.

Oh, the novel itself? Going quite well. Already at around 6700 words, and the first chapter is done. It's a PI novel, so I can write it in first person, throw in a lot of observational stuff (like the Travis McGee novels I am plowing through at a frightening rate) and keep things hidden from the reader until they NEED to be revealed. It also makes the construction of the novel a bit harder, as I can ONLY reference what the narrator knows or observes.

I've also been writing notes for how to do some more thematic things when I go through and do the rewrite. Just the little things that I notice in the better crime novels I read...I want it to be more than just “story story story”, and get back to that mindset I was in for the first two zombie novels that ended up having a lot of cool little emotional moments that were heightened by little tricks that were almost subliminal. It's hard to describe without giving things away, but it's all in how characters relate to each other, and using some subtle things that will point to when characters are lying that won't be apparent until the three big reveals.

I'm also going to be blogging more. Partly because I want to start pushing my writing again (yeah, getting the webstrip started was a pretty big deal to me) and partly because I feel that I am keeping WAY too much of myself closed off from people.

And besides, doesn't the world need another blogger clogging up the internets?