Well, so much for promising a podcast. So much has been happening in the last week that I haven't had the time or the energy to put one together. I have lots of pieces of raw audio, though, so I'm sure that some well-judged editing will see me right for a podcast tomorrow. It's a week overdue, but never mind.
Preparations for NaNoWriMo are going well. I've started by outlining the story, including the work that I'd done already, and although I haven't so far got much further than I had in the existing text I've managed to come to a better understanding of my main characters and their motivations, as well as solving a few knotty plot problems that were already becoming apparent by the 11,000 word mark.
One thing that's odd in participating in NaNoWriMo, for me at least, is that the 50,000 word limit that is set for the competition isn't anything near what I'm going to be aiming for in the long term. In order for the novel to be at all publishable, especially since it's by an unknown author with no publishing credits to his name, it has to be somewhere between 80,000 and 100,000 words, which means that NaNoWriMo is going to have to account for just half of the story.
On one hand that's a good thing; I won't be able to just sit back and relax once (if) I've completed the 50,000 words. I'll need to keep going, probably through December and into January, before I'm able to go back and do the first set of rewrites. On the other hand I have to constantly be aware that I can't let the story rush by in 50,000 words and then not have anything to fill the other 50,000 with. That hasn't been a problem so far but I can see it becoming one if my imagination starts to run out of steam.
In other news, I've already put down the opening page or two for The Great Christmas Story Without Ghosts 2005. Regardless of how I'm doing on the novel in December I'll try to get this finished in time for Christmas or at least New Year. I know roughly what the plot is going to be, and hopefully it'll explore some of the moral ambiguities of Santa's job whilst being nice and warm and wacky at the same time. Well, warm in places and wacky at any rate. I can't guarantee nice.
