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izmeinaThree years in Nanoland from the extreme of a last minute sign up with no plot, no plan and no nothing to the best part of a year musing and scheming.
Turns out that the best path is the one somewhere in the middle. But that should hardly be surprising
As usual resorted to the usual scheme of 88 randomly drawn tarot cards to form the basic jigsaw pieces of the story. The goal would be to find some sort of way of linking them all together in some sort of coherent fashion so that the origin of the plot would be almost invisible
Stuff can get moved around to where it works best during editing time but the November squiggling would preserve the randomly generated order based on the idea that constraints are good for creativity
Did the random draws not in November like the first time or September like the second but ridiculously early back in February. Sharing the same days and dates as November, February or March seemed a most auspicious time to start.
Last year had kept the major arcana cards out of the random draw due to being annoyed the previous time that Justice turned up some five times.
This time let them back in. Turned out to be a most silly idea indeed. Will tweek the rule next year to keep them out for the first six rounds which are dedicated mainly to the introduction of the characters. Having the Empress turn up in the High Priestess’s chapter and vice versa just got kind of confusing. In the end the two main girls got so mixed up that it was a case of picking the most useful traits at the time.
So way back then the game was to just lay out the cards and see if any interesting ideas appeared just looking at them in batches of 12.
Had a little black book for ideas and inspiration but aside from the first 8 cards which yielded some rather interesting characters, there was very little that stood out at all
Doing nerdish stuff like counting the number of times each card appeared or placing more significance on chapters where lots of court cards or majors turned up did not yield many leads.
The only thing that seemed certain was that the preponderance of lots of royals with cups in their hands would mean some serious drinking and a town with a ridiculous number of bars and booze ups.
At least that was some sort of start. Then there were two cards that appeared together twice - first time in the middle of the story and then near the end. For the lack of other inspiration, these two can be some sort of turning points. Especially handy that it was chapter 13 that the terrible twins made their debut. Nothing like a couple of bodies to get stuff happening
By now it was May and there was still no golden thread to be found. Redrawing and rearranging were out of the question as too many options just wastes too much time contemplating them all instead of getting stuff done
There was the inspired idea of using Camp Nanowrimo as an opportunity to run through all the cards in order. Not the story order as the story itself is for November but just from the first to the last in the deck. That got around 24,000 words on the scoreboard so it was time to drag out another deck and add them for inspiration.
That was Kat Black’s Touchstone Tarot which must be the best deck ever for character creation. She has an eye for amazing art. Most of these people were painted some 300 years ago but with only a change of clothing they look like they could be your next door neighbours.
November is for proper novels but Camp nano is for fooling around and being generally rebellious. So it turned out that the 24 cards that did not appear anywhere in the random drawings were the ones which seemed to generate the most interesting ideas
It was the roulette wheel on the Touchstone Wheel of Fortune that provided a useful drinking game and means of sneaking some of the cards into the story itself but very well disguised of course.
Strange thing was, once August ended, only took a few quick peeks for ideas relying mainly on memory.
It was a different trick that finally delivered the goods.
Just looking at the cards waiting for a golden thread to appear was just not working. It was time to shake the living daylights out of them to get their sneaky little secrets. If a golden thread was not going to appear of its own accord, it was now time to just go ahead and make one.
So got out the old reliable packet of index cards. There were 88 of them, four for each chapter. Instead of trying to find some grand theme simply listed three possible scenes on each one - the first relating the card to the chapter title, the second to the one that came immediately before it and the third to the one that came after it.
So there would be no shortage of prompts once the serious squiggling started. With a bit of luck some story lines would provide much more than the necessary 200 words.
So now it seemed there was plenty of potential ideas and it would just be a matter of watching most of the pieces of the jigsaw fall into place. At least this stack of 260 or so scenes meant having no excuse for writers block.
Everything went according to plan and the little trip down south was very inspiring. Spent quite a lot of time in a certain kitsch cafe sitting on the balcony or even better at a table in a room where almost available bit of real estate was covered in kitsch. Garish excuses for art adorned the walls, there were cabinets full of souvenir spoons, glasses, goblets and hideous china ornaments. Then there were the piles of books including such gems as the Royal Family Annuals from 1980 or 1981 or the 1987 Yates garden diary.
It was a gorgeous sunny day and the garden fair down the road had attracted an unusual number of passers by. The previous two days had been one of only two or three customers in the place and that Sunday they probably had more than they ever had for the whole month. They were running way behind with the coffees. Izzie was delighted. That meant they would not be lurking around trying to make small talk. Got to take lots of photos of the feast of freakery and wrote pages and pages describing the scenery in detail. That included the titles of about twenty of those most delightful books. That list did not make it into the nanowrimo novel but it sure helped having all the names of these crazy corny books as a reminder of the sad state of this cavernous collection of bric a brac
Of course the small talk on the previous two days was most useful. He showed Izzie the article in the local paper proclaiming that this would be the very last year of the annual garden festival of country gardens as the organizer was feeling overwhelmed at having to do all the work by herself over the last ten years and no one else wanted to help.
Well. That was the official version. It seemed the story between the lines was that she was a bit of a control freak who made life hell for anyone who did want to help. She also insulted him saying that his garden was not good enough to enter after he had questioned some rule about entry fees. This happened to be perfectly true. The garden was truly awful but kind of cute in its own way. Three visits in three days means it has to have some sort of pulling power.
He was deeply offended by her verdict about the state of his garden and had not a good word to say about her. That meant lots more juicy ideas for Izzie. Did think that while the festival organizer was right it was not the sort of way to treat people when you need all the help and good will you can get.
Ten years from now he will be telling customers about that insult. Assuming of course that he does not go bankrupt before then. Anyone who has ever seen the place will wonder how they could stay in business for more than two years and not the seven or so he has already been there
It was a very inspiring first ten days or so. Such vivid memories from down south made it so much easier to write. But then the magic abruptly ended. Turned into a zombie for three days triggered by a squealing baby on a bus, getting off too early to escape the screaming beast and then getting hopelessly lost. A silly thing but sufficient to turn the Izzie into a nervous wreck. The heritage festival was not much better. Being jumpy and neurotic is not a conducive state for squiggling.
Kept going anyway. The daily quota makes no allowance for moods. Will shortly get around to peeking through the pages of the last few weeks and it will be interesting to know if there is an obvious difference in the squiggling
So on Monday 21st November was in the unusual situation of having reached 44,000 words but completely and totally uninspired. So what’s a squiggling serpent to do?
Could start at the top end of the town and just write detailed descriptions of all the shops on the main street. But that would not solve the problem of the big blank bits in the last five chapters
Decided instead to grab the deck of cards and write scenes for each of the 24 that did not turn up during the original random shuffle.
The first of these was the King of Pentacles. The old man on the horse crossing a river on the way up to his castle on the hill. He looked rather like the Hierophant who was a sweet old geekish man teaching what looked like the Turkish version of Sunday School to a bunch of enthusiastic children.
In August he was paying a visit to the orphanage there but now the evil serpent had a much more wicked inspiration. Let’s burn the place down. That will clock up the word count and increase the chaos and nastiness infesting our little piece of paradise
So feeling most evil indeed, there is only one logical place in a tarot tale to place a burning building on a hill. Off to chapter 16 with the box of matches. The 10 of cups was sitting there with not a word to its name. The Victorian Romantic version of this card has a baby shower sort of scene with a woman and all her friends crowding around to drool over the latest family member.
So the rescue scene, the blame game and accusations of incompetence provided lots of useful conflict and even more words. But now November is over and still not awarded any of the garden prizes yet.
So learned a few lessons this time around. Will be using the exact same 88 card sequence next time but with a very different deck. No Victorian ladies, circus freaks or romantic garden scenes but lots of dark alleyways, towers, tentacled monsters, swamps and graveyards
This year’s stack of 88 index cards are blank on the back so can recycle them again. It will be interesting to compare what a difference the images will make to the story.
September is plenty of time to start plotting and planning without the danger of becoming too bored with the story by the time November rolls around.
But before then will try doing a bunch of shorter stories. It would be a good idea to practice finishing stories rather than running out of steam two-thirds of the way through them.
PS The serpent will be slowly catching up now on all the snail mail and Christmas cards.
Turns out that the best path is the one somewhere in the middle. But that should hardly be surprising
As usual resorted to the usual scheme of 88 randomly drawn tarot cards to form the basic jigsaw pieces of the story. The goal would be to find some sort of way of linking them all together in some sort of coherent fashion so that the origin of the plot would be almost invisible
Stuff can get moved around to where it works best during editing time but the November squiggling would preserve the randomly generated order based on the idea that constraints are good for creativity
Did the random draws not in November like the first time or September like the second but ridiculously early back in February. Sharing the same days and dates as November, February or March seemed a most auspicious time to start.
Last year had kept the major arcana cards out of the random draw due to being annoyed the previous time that Justice turned up some five times.
This time let them back in. Turned out to be a most silly idea indeed. Will tweek the rule next year to keep them out for the first six rounds which are dedicated mainly to the introduction of the characters. Having the Empress turn up in the High Priestess’s chapter and vice versa just got kind of confusing. In the end the two main girls got so mixed up that it was a case of picking the most useful traits at the time.
So way back then the game was to just lay out the cards and see if any interesting ideas appeared just looking at them in batches of 12.
Had a little black book for ideas and inspiration but aside from the first 8 cards which yielded some rather interesting characters, there was very little that stood out at all
Doing nerdish stuff like counting the number of times each card appeared or placing more significance on chapters where lots of court cards or majors turned up did not yield many leads.
The only thing that seemed certain was that the preponderance of lots of royals with cups in their hands would mean some serious drinking and a town with a ridiculous number of bars and booze ups.
At least that was some sort of start. Then there were two cards that appeared together twice - first time in the middle of the story and then near the end. For the lack of other inspiration, these two can be some sort of turning points. Especially handy that it was chapter 13 that the terrible twins made their debut. Nothing like a couple of bodies to get stuff happening
By now it was May and there was still no golden thread to be found. Redrawing and rearranging were out of the question as too many options just wastes too much time contemplating them all instead of getting stuff done
There was the inspired idea of using Camp Nanowrimo as an opportunity to run through all the cards in order. Not the story order as the story itself is for November but just from the first to the last in the deck. That got around 24,000 words on the scoreboard so it was time to drag out another deck and add them for inspiration.
That was Kat Black’s Touchstone Tarot which must be the best deck ever for character creation. She has an eye for amazing art. Most of these people were painted some 300 years ago but with only a change of clothing they look like they could be your next door neighbours.
November is for proper novels but Camp nano is for fooling around and being generally rebellious. So it turned out that the 24 cards that did not appear anywhere in the random drawings were the ones which seemed to generate the most interesting ideas
It was the roulette wheel on the Touchstone Wheel of Fortune that provided a useful drinking game and means of sneaking some of the cards into the story itself but very well disguised of course.
Strange thing was, once August ended, only took a few quick peeks for ideas relying mainly on memory.
It was a different trick that finally delivered the goods.
Just looking at the cards waiting for a golden thread to appear was just not working. It was time to shake the living daylights out of them to get their sneaky little secrets. If a golden thread was not going to appear of its own accord, it was now time to just go ahead and make one.
So got out the old reliable packet of index cards. There were 88 of them, four for each chapter. Instead of trying to find some grand theme simply listed three possible scenes on each one - the first relating the card to the chapter title, the second to the one that came immediately before it and the third to the one that came after it.
So there would be no shortage of prompts once the serious squiggling started. With a bit of luck some story lines would provide much more than the necessary 200 words.
So now it seemed there was plenty of potential ideas and it would just be a matter of watching most of the pieces of the jigsaw fall into place. At least this stack of 260 or so scenes meant having no excuse for writers block.
Everything went according to plan and the little trip down south was very inspiring. Spent quite a lot of time in a certain kitsch cafe sitting on the balcony or even better at a table in a room where almost available bit of real estate was covered in kitsch. Garish excuses for art adorned the walls, there were cabinets full of souvenir spoons, glasses, goblets and hideous china ornaments. Then there were the piles of books including such gems as the Royal Family Annuals from 1980 or 1981 or the 1987 Yates garden diary.
It was a gorgeous sunny day and the garden fair down the road had attracted an unusual number of passers by. The previous two days had been one of only two or three customers in the place and that Sunday they probably had more than they ever had for the whole month. They were running way behind with the coffees. Izzie was delighted. That meant they would not be lurking around trying to make small talk. Got to take lots of photos of the feast of freakery and wrote pages and pages describing the scenery in detail. That included the titles of about twenty of those most delightful books. That list did not make it into the nanowrimo novel but it sure helped having all the names of these crazy corny books as a reminder of the sad state of this cavernous collection of bric a brac
Of course the small talk on the previous two days was most useful. He showed Izzie the article in the local paper proclaiming that this would be the very last year of the annual garden festival of country gardens as the organizer was feeling overwhelmed at having to do all the work by herself over the last ten years and no one else wanted to help.
Well. That was the official version. It seemed the story between the lines was that she was a bit of a control freak who made life hell for anyone who did want to help. She also insulted him saying that his garden was not good enough to enter after he had questioned some rule about entry fees. This happened to be perfectly true. The garden was truly awful but kind of cute in its own way. Three visits in three days means it has to have some sort of pulling power.
He was deeply offended by her verdict about the state of his garden and had not a good word to say about her. That meant lots more juicy ideas for Izzie. Did think that while the festival organizer was right it was not the sort of way to treat people when you need all the help and good will you can get.
Ten years from now he will be telling customers about that insult. Assuming of course that he does not go bankrupt before then. Anyone who has ever seen the place will wonder how they could stay in business for more than two years and not the seven or so he has already been there
It was a very inspiring first ten days or so. Such vivid memories from down south made it so much easier to write. But then the magic abruptly ended. Turned into a zombie for three days triggered by a squealing baby on a bus, getting off too early to escape the screaming beast and then getting hopelessly lost. A silly thing but sufficient to turn the Izzie into a nervous wreck. The heritage festival was not much better. Being jumpy and neurotic is not a conducive state for squiggling.
Kept going anyway. The daily quota makes no allowance for moods. Will shortly get around to peeking through the pages of the last few weeks and it will be interesting to know if there is an obvious difference in the squiggling
So on Monday 21st November was in the unusual situation of having reached 44,000 words but completely and totally uninspired. So what’s a squiggling serpent to do?
Could start at the top end of the town and just write detailed descriptions of all the shops on the main street. But that would not solve the problem of the big blank bits in the last five chapters
Decided instead to grab the deck of cards and write scenes for each of the 24 that did not turn up during the original random shuffle.
The first of these was the King of Pentacles. The old man on the horse crossing a river on the way up to his castle on the hill. He looked rather like the Hierophant who was a sweet old geekish man teaching what looked like the Turkish version of Sunday School to a bunch of enthusiastic children.
In August he was paying a visit to the orphanage there but now the evil serpent had a much more wicked inspiration. Let’s burn the place down. That will clock up the word count and increase the chaos and nastiness infesting our little piece of paradise
So feeling most evil indeed, there is only one logical place in a tarot tale to place a burning building on a hill. Off to chapter 16 with the box of matches. The 10 of cups was sitting there with not a word to its name. The Victorian Romantic version of this card has a baby shower sort of scene with a woman and all her friends crowding around to drool over the latest family member.
So the rescue scene, the blame game and accusations of incompetence provided lots of useful conflict and even more words. But now November is over and still not awarded any of the garden prizes yet.
So learned a few lessons this time around. Will be using the exact same 88 card sequence next time but with a very different deck. No Victorian ladies, circus freaks or romantic garden scenes but lots of dark alleyways, towers, tentacled monsters, swamps and graveyards
This year’s stack of 88 index cards are blank on the back so can recycle them again. It will be interesting to compare what a difference the images will make to the story.
September is plenty of time to start plotting and planning without the danger of becoming too bored with the story by the time November rolls around.
But before then will try doing a bunch of shorter stories. It would be a good idea to practice finishing stories rather than running out of steam two-thirds of the way through them.
PS The serpent will be slowly catching up now on all the snail mail and Christmas cards.
