NaNoWriMo 2015 Update

Greetings from the halfway point of National Novel Writing Month. As I write this, I just validated my word count at a little over 25,000 words.

This year has been a bit of a nightmare, especially compared to last year. Let me break it down a bit for you:

Last year, I was loaded for bear. I came into the competition with a clear idea of what I was going to write about. I even had an outline, which is something I've never done. I'm usually a seat of the pants kind of writer, just going with whatever strikes me, but I learned about NaNo from the October issue of Writer's Digest, and I wanted to be as prepared as possible.

The end result was that the story seemed to write itself, up until I wrote "The End", which came about 10,000 words too early. And so I had to start editing and expanding with about a week and a half left in the competition. This can't be unusual. Hell, I'd never written 50,000 words in one shot ever, so I didn't know what 50,000 words even looked like. But I made it; on November 23, 2014, I rolled over 50k and took the prize in my very first NaNoWriMo.

That story became Sleepless Murder, which, although it's currently available on Amazon.com, I am still in the process of revising. I'm not making any major changes, I just want to get it more in line with the sequel. I could just make the sequel more in line with the first one, but these are changes I wanted to make from the beginning; to be honest, the book was only published to make the deadline so I could claim one of the prizes.

But I digress, I was talking about why this NaNo has been a trial.

This year I decided to keep to my roots and go seat of the pants. I also started the book making the assumption that a change I was going to make to Sleepless was the right thing to do.

*Warning* The rest of this post will contain spoilers about Sleepless Murder and possibly its sequel. If you're at all interested in reading these books and do not wish to have anything spoiled for you, please stop reading.

Sleepless Murder follows a former hacker named Kaleb Davies. He's a homicide detective who spends his days off helping  people reclaim stolen identities. When one of his clients is murdered Kaleb finds himself hunting a killer with no type, no motive and no consistent MO. Without realizing it, Kaleb confronts the killer and leads him to Chloe and Liam, Kaleb's girlfriend and nephew. The two are kidnapped by the killer and Kaleb is forced to fall back on his hacking skills in order to find them.

One of the changes I wanted to make to SM was at the end; I wanted Kaleb to quit the police force and go out on his own as a private investigator, specializing in cyber crime.

I came into the sequel expecting this change to be in effect and I forced it for about 10,000 words. Then, at the end of the first week, I hit a block. Hard. The kind of block that I've only ever read about in writing books.

It was then that I took a hard look at the differences in the stories. Obviously the plot was different; there was no way around that, but I believed in the plot line. I knew it could work. The characters were pretty much the same; Kaleb was the narrator, Josh (his brother), Liam (nephew) and Chloe (his girlfriend) all made appearances, as did his former partner, so I knew it wasn't the characters blocking me. So I knew that it had to be the one major difference: Kaleb's occupation.

I don't know why, but having Kaleb as a PI did not work in the least. And so, at the beginning of Week 2, I started over, once again making Kaleb into a homicide detective.

And the story took off, writing itself just like its predecessor. I once again have the feeling that I'd rather be working on my own story instead of reading other people's stories when I'm on lunch at work.

So that's been NaNoWriMo for me this year; a complete restart one week in was a major speed bump, but it's been for the best. I can't wait to get back to revising Sleepless Murder and get to revising and titling this story.