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Author Topic: NaNoWriMo 2016! The Pre-Beginning Begins!  (Read 9925 times)

TheBiggerFish

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Re: NaNoWriMo 2016! The Pre-Beginning Begins!
« Reply #30 on: October 31, 2016, 10:01:03 am »

And we're off. Good luck folks.
It's the 31st...
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Caz

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Re: NaNoWriMo 2016! The Pre-Beginning Begins!
« Reply #31 on: October 31, 2016, 11:38:08 am »

And we're off. Good luck folks.
It's the 31st...

Depends which side of the globe you are sitting on.
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Sirus

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Re: NaNoWriMo 2016! The Pre-Beginning Begins!
« Reply #32 on: October 31, 2016, 03:19:50 pm »

Well, in AMERICA AKA REAL TRUE TIME, it's still Halloween :P

i kid, i kid
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Insanegame27

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Re: NaNoWriMo 2016! The Pre-Beginning Begins!
« Reply #33 on: October 31, 2016, 03:41:21 pm »

Pfft, Australia time best time.


Good luck folks.
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Caz

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Re: NaNoWriMo 2016! The Pre-Beginning Begins!
« Reply #34 on: November 01, 2016, 05:05:35 am »

Got par by 10am. Whee.
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Insanegame27

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Re: NaNoWriMo 2016! The Pre-Beginning Begins!
« Reply #35 on: November 01, 2016, 05:25:06 am »

Day 1 nearly gone and I'm 2k words behind schedule. someone's staying up late tonight.
BTW my goal is 60K, which is 2k per day, rather than 50k and 1.6666666666666...k For ease of computation and because I'm gonna need the space for words.
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Power/metagaming RL since Birth/Born to do it.
Quote from: Second Amendment
A militia cannot function properly without arms, therefore the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.
The military cannot function without tanks and warplanes, therefore the right of the people to keep and bear tanks and warplanes, shall not be infringed.
The military cannot function without ICBMs, therefore the right of the people to keep and bear ICBMs, shall not be infringed.

TheBiggerFish

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Re: NaNoWriMo 2016! The Pre-Beginning Begins!
« Reply #36 on: November 01, 2016, 11:34:44 am »

If I'm doing this, I have no idea what I'm even writing :v
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Darkmere

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Re: NaNoWriMo 2016! The Pre-Beginning Begins!
« Reply #37 on: November 01, 2016, 11:46:37 am »

1300 words in the opening sprint. Better than I expected.
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Sirus

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Re: NaNoWriMo 2016! The Pre-Beginning Begins!
« Reply #38 on: November 01, 2016, 12:15:49 pm »

Alright dudes, I'll be home in a few hours and I need to decide once and for all the kind of story I will attempt to write this month. I figure I might do better if I share my novel-in-progress with an audience...so what sort of thing might you folks be interested in reading?

Idea 1: Super plague wipes out humanity except for one dude. There are no zombies or vampires or any supernatural things to deal with. Instead, the story is about how the dude copes with a world of ever-present loneliness, degrading  equipment and infrastructure, and the slow onset of psychosis more than a decade after the world ended.

Idea 2: Cosmic horror of a sort. The world hasn't quite ended, but it's in a slow and steady decline after an event called the Fracture. Global temperatures are dropping, suicide rates have skyrocketed, the world's governments have joined forces but all they can do is barely keep things together. A group of companions tries to piece together exactly what happened and, more importantly, to see if anything can be done about it.

Those are the two stories I've done the most thinking and planning about.
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Valdus92

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Re: NaNoWriMo 2016! The Pre-Beginning Begins!
« Reply #39 on: November 01, 2016, 12:28:54 pm »

I say combine the two.

I went off, surprisingly. I started by thinking about doing an oracle writing, pick a symbol and write, but it has exploded to fictionalizing the whole creative and oracle process into a letter from a (mad)man to his brother.
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Sirus

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Re: NaNoWriMo 2016! The Pre-Beginning Begins!
« Reply #40 on: November 01, 2016, 12:34:00 pm »

How would one combine last-man-on-Earth with still-some-people-and-some-semblance-of-society?
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Draignean

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Re: NaNoWriMo 2016! The Pre-Beginning Begins!
« Reply #41 on: November 01, 2016, 12:34:43 pm »

Idea 1: Super plague wipes out humanity except for one dude. There are no zombies or vampires or any supernatural things to deal with. Instead, the story is about how the dude copes with a world of ever-present loneliness, degrading  equipment and infrastructure, and the slow onset of psychosis more than a decade after the world ended.

Uh...  That kind of thing takes a LOT of skill to write. Not saying you don't have it, but it's the kind of story that a lot of people try to tell and end up getting bogged down in the amount of navel gazing that needs to be done.

You deal with the problem where all of your action that involves other people, all of your of your interaction-action, revolves around hallucinations/dreams/flashbacks, and at a certain point the reader may start to wonder what the point even is. If everyone else is dead, then the resolution of the story becomes really constrained. At the end, the protag is some combination of  happy/unhappy (read as psychologically resolved/ psychologically broken) and alive/dead- and because you have nobody else in the story, the reader is bound to wonder about what the point any of this was.

Again, I don't want to be that guy who tries to tell you what makes a good story or not- but IMHO, this is a truly difficult story to tell well.

Idea 2: Cosmic horror of a sort. The world hasn't quite ended, but it's in a slow and steady decline after an event called the Fracture. Global temperatures are dropping, suicide rates have skyrocketed, the world's governments have joined forces but all they can do is barely keep things together. A group of companions tries to piece together exactly what happened and, more importantly, to see if anything can be done about it.

Much easier, orders of magnitude easier than the first option. This is an idea that's easy to arc out from and pick what kind of story you want to tell, as well as keep some diversity within the moment. Not much else to say, since this a fairly standard theme to pick up and play with. (X is terribly wrong with the world, and John, Jack, Jill, and Jane are united in their desire to survive X's ravages. But what will happen when event Y unfolds, giving them a critical glimpse at a way to stop X, while pitting them against hurdles A-K?)

I'm interested in the whole "World Governments have joined together" business, largely because I'm pretty sure that will only happen some time after Jesus and Hitler go ice skating in Hell.


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Darkmere

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Re: NaNoWriMo 2016! The Pre-Beginning Begins!
« Reply #42 on: November 01, 2016, 12:56:29 pm »

Yeah only having one protagonist is... ruinous. I tried that my first year and it was a real struggle the entire way, to the point that once she actually encountered someone else I breathed a sigh of relief and the story tripled in pace from there on.

Everyone has internal conflict, but being social animals we crave that sort of interaction between more than one person. No one who has access to your story will live in such true isolation, so that's a huge barrier to scale before you can make a connection with your audience. Plus, the ending is guaranteed a downer.

Cosmic horror sounds much better. I already want to know what the Fracture was and how desperate survivors must be to work together on a scale like that. There's a LOT of story to tell there, that will be easier for you to maintain in the long run.
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And then, they will be weaponized. Like everything in this game, from kittens to babies, everything is a potential device of murder.
So if baseless speculation is all we have, we might as well treat it like fact.

Sirus

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Re: NaNoWriMo 2016! The Pre-Beginning Begins!
« Reply #43 on: November 01, 2016, 01:02:55 pm »

I wasn't planning to keep the LMOE alone for the entire story, y'know  :P

Still, it seems folks are interested in the second idea more. Fine by me, I've been wanting to cover that one for a couple of years now.
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Twinwolf

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Re: NaNoWriMo 2016! The Pre-Beginning Begins!
« Reply #44 on: November 01, 2016, 04:51:19 pm »

Welp, let's give this a go then.
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