Thoughts on NaNo as it wraps up

I hit 50k last Tuesday--and very glad I did. Thanksgiving and everything else since then has made it much more difficult to keep up the pace I'd had earlier. Well...to be honest, part of that slower pace is due to having already met the 50k. I just hit 60k this evening, which was the goal I'd initially set for myself. I'm still hoping to get a little more over the last 24 hours, but it looks like the revised goals I'd set in the middle of the month were overly optimistic.

Enough about word counts.

I remain pleased with the story. I'm pulling in all kinds of wild and resonant images in a rather surreal way. The storyline itself, though, is pretty well grounded, which I think will keep it from the dangers of veering off into this-only-makes-sense-to-me surreality. As I think I wrote earlier this month, when I jotted down some ideas for the book, I realized I had two main turning points in addition to the final climactic scene, so I structured the book so that those would evenly divide the story into three acts, as it were. I just wrote that second turning point this afternoon (which would seem to put this right on track for a 90k-word novel). As with last time, I'm floundering a bit in this next section, but some of the things coming up that had been very vague are beginning to fall into place in my head.

I don't think I've posted here what I put on my NaNo novel info page, so here it is (and I still don't really know how that final confrontation will play out or what exactly she'll learn/discover/do in the ruins of the refectory):
In a sprawling, surreal city of inexplicable structures, ancient technology, and the mysterious rhymer-folk, where most people know only their immediate surroundings, Iymae is a guide, leading her clients through the alleys and tunnels of the city to their destinations. When a strange corporate boss hires her to travel to a part of the city even she doesn't know and guide his niece back to meet him, Iymae doesn't hesitate. The job, though, turns out to be more than she expected, shoving her into a mysterious culture of robotic constructs and arcane technology, and ultimately sending her beyond the city itself into the vast ruins of a pre-cataclysmic refectory where [...well, what happens there is part of what I'll discover as I NaNo this year...]

Comments

Lauren Michelle said…
Congrats on your hard work, Dan. Looks like you have most of a query letter all set to go, too. :D
Daniel Ausema said…
Thanks, Lauren! Yeah, I tried to give the summary the feel of a query letter, though of course once I finish the story I'll know if I can use it with just minor tweaking or have to completely change it...