NaNoWriMo (November 2020)

[Valka D'Ur]

Well, that time of year is upon us (or at least me; not sure if anyone else here is participating).

Forget Halloween. At the stroke of 1 minute past midnight, November 1, I will be doing the first word of a 50,000-word marathon.

This time around I actually have a plan. Sort of. I winged it last year and managed to get somewhere. This time around I decided to make an outline of what parts of the story I want to transfer from rambling around in my mind to actually being on paper (this is an old computer, so I'm doing it longhand this time).

This thread is for everyone participating, and anyone who isn't but is interested or curious about what NaNoWriMo is, and why anyone would do this. After all, it's a competition in which you're not competing for any tangible prize, and nobody even sees your work unless you show it to them. Your story isn't judged in any merits other than word count, and only you know if it's any good or not.

Most people are honest about their NaNo experiences, though, in talking about the ups, down, and sideways directions that can lead to something weird that can turn out rather wonderful.

What I've done differently so far this time is join a FB group for Wrimosaurs (aka participants from Alberta; the "saurs" part of the name comes from the fact that the province I live in is rich in dinosaur fossils, so someone thought it would be a cool name for our group). I don't expect to spend a lot of time there, though. I'm just curious to see how many other people from Red Deer are doing this. It was surprising to see about half a dozen.

Anyway, if you're participating this time, feel free to tell us about your project, update your progress, vent if you want to, be happy when things go well, and if you need help or suggestions, just ask. A major part of NaNoWriMo is writers supporting and encouraging one another.

If you're not participating but have comments or questions, feel free to join in. I post these threads in the hope that I won't just be talking to myself. All I ask is that you keep this thread for NaNoWriMo. Other writing projects should go in Zkribbler's thread.

 

[Zkribbler]

I'll be here, watching. I take my hat off to all participants.

 

[Valka D'Ur]

Time for an update.

The website is still a piece of <crap>. They've lost the stats for several of my competitions, as though I'd never done them. It's still not even remotely intuitive, and is a classic example of how not to make a website.

That said...

I'm discovering that doing this longhand is a hell of a lot harder when I'm trying to do 1700 words/day, rather than only 500. It's painful. It's also frustrating, because the only good light in this place is natural sunlight. There's not much of it on the northeast side of a building in November, at this latitude.

Why longhand? Because my word processing program sometimes decides to malfunction. And I'm tired of constantly being asked to register my copy of Open Office every damn time I log in. If we could only send PMs to ourselves here, I could just do my writing in a series of posts and PM them to myself...

Anyway, here are the first three days:

Day 1: 1700 words.
Day 2: 3404 words.
Day 3: 5255 words.

Anyway, the story itself... I'm doing more with the alternative version of my original story, beginning with the escape from Griffinvale (via cargo ship), and arrival at the Winter Palace in Ravensmoor.

I need a good name for the ship, and a good source of information on 11th-century cargo ships (I do have a book about medieval/Renaissance/Age of Sail ships, but it's packed away in some box or other...).

And for some reason, in a story where everyone else is either AU British, Celt, German, or French, the captain of this ship is Greek (or at least Greek-descended). No real reason for it; I just liked the name I gave him and decided to worry about his backstory later.

 

[Joij21]

I need a good name for the ship, and a good source of information on 11th-century cargo ships (I do have a book about medieval/Renaissance/Age of Sail ships, but it's packed away in some box or other...).

The Cassandra. The captain is Greek after all.

 

[Zkribbler]

The Cassandra. The captain is Greek after all.

Good but how about Lady Madeline?

 

[Valka D'Ur]

Good but how about Lady Madeline?

You're suggesting I name an 11th century cargo ship after my cat?

Hmm. Interesting idea. My first cat's name was Cassandra (a beautiful blue-eyed Siamese, whose best friend was Snoopy, our brown and white beagle).

Other cats I've had... Maggie (short for Magdalyn, a character in several Darkover novels; mentioned because at the time, people would ask if I named her after Margaret Thatcher), Lightning, Tomtat, Gussy, Chloe...

Or maybe I'll have the captain name the ship after the Queen who was alive at the time when the ship was first built (his father would have owned it at the time). Her name was Giselle - one of the characters I created, based on one of the puzzles in the game that shows that the murdered king had two wives - one long dead, and this fact is obvious in the puzzle but never mentioned by any of the characters. So I concluded that Queen Giselle was the real mother of the Heir's father, and the second Queen (whom I named Beryl) is just an opportunistic usurper (gotta admit that I'm taking inspiration from I, Claudius for this, as Livia Augusta displaced Augustus' first wife, Scribonia, and over the years managed to maneuver her own family into positions of power while offing the original lineage of heirs).

I've been mulling over how Queen Giselle died; I decided to kill off some of the older generation of characters by saying that there was some sort of plague that went around the kingdom about 32-33 years before the opening scenes of the game, and that's why a lot of parents and grandparents are missing; they died. This also explains how so many of the original members of the Council of Dukes who signed the attestation of the Heir's legitimacy 30 years before are still alive; they became Dukes at a young age when their parents' generation died. But then I wondered if Queen Giselle really died of plague or if the then Lady Beryl offed her and took advantage of the King's grief to maneuver him into marrying her...

 

[Zkribbler]

You're suggesting I name an 11th century cargo ship after my cat?

I've been mulling over how Queen Giselle died; I decided to kill off some of the older generation of characters by saying that there was some sort of plague that went around the kingdom about 32-33 years before the opening scenes of the game, and that's why a lot of parents and grandparents are missing; they died. This also explains how so many of the original members of the Council of Dukes who signed the attestation of the Heir's legitimacy 30 years before are still alive; they became Dukes at a young age when their parents' generation died. But then I wondered if Queen Giselle really died of plague or if the then Lady Beryl offed her and took advantage of the King's grief to maneuver him into marrying her...

You idea for a plague is a good one. It is logical & explains a lot. I vote for a plague death for Giselle rather than a murder. A murder would lead to an investigation, which may expose Beryl.

 

[Valka D'Ur]

You idea for a plague is a good one. It is logical & explains a lot. I vote for a plague death for Giselle rather than a murder. A murder would lead to an investigation, which may expose Beryl.

A plague would serve to explain why the Heir has no living grandparents (he doesn't find out he's the heir until after he's accused of murdering his grandfather, the King). And Queen Beryl is one of the Bad Guys... there's this ultra-creepy bit of dialogue she says in the torture chamber when the heir is tied to the rack, and I remember thinking that it's CREEPY to say stuff like that to your own grandson (by that time she knew who the real heir was, although he didn't; he doesn't find out until after he's rescued).

So when I had a second look at the portraits puzzle and noticed that the King had two wives, one living, one dead, I reasoned that the deceased Queen (Giselle) must have been the mother to the dead Prince Thomas, who in turn was father to the heir (he never knew he'd fathered a son, since he was killed on the battlefield several months before his son was born). And in turn, Queen Beryl has this creepy, slimy way of speaking to her step-grandson who has no idea that there's any kind of familial relationship going on.

(I'm not making that characterization up, btw; it's in the game... the only thing I made up about Queen Beryl is her name and part of her backstory).

I guess at this time it might help to show wtf I'm talking about:

This is the royal lineage/portraits puzzle, and the goal is to slide the portraits into the correct place to show the previous few generations' lineage that leads to the Heir being revealed (this puzzle is hidden in a secret panel in the Duke of Ulmer's study).

Note the small portraits beside the empty frames on the left side of the puzzle. Those are the monarchs' spouses. I found the first one fascinating, because the official monarch was a queen and the small portrait shows her consort. I decided to use this fact as an way to explain why the opening dialogue talks about "the last Great King of Griffinvale" and I wondered why he was the last. Were all his heirs inept? Was the kingdom exterminated? Or more likely, maybe his heirs were female.

This portrait puzzle makes it clear that Queen Regnants are possible and acceptable in Griffinvale, so I decided that this long-ago Queen (I guesstimate she must have lived maybe a couple of centuries before the game events) was Queen Gabriella, who was a very smart woman and did an excellent job of ruling before her son took over (I never decided on any names for her consort or son). And this makes it easy to decide that the new King (the "Heir" in the title of the game) will have a daughter as his eldest child, and will make her his heir.

I'm having conflicting thoughts about that, however. Every time I try to think of Princess Angela Rose Harding as an upcoming capable ruler, she does a left turn at Albuquerque in my mind and comes out with some bit of nasty, self-entitled dialogue and her father wonders wtf he did wrong in raising her. I might have to un-kill her brother (died due to miscarriage) to make the story work in later in-universe decades.

Anyway... have a look at the five portraits on the right. The one at the top centre is Queen Gabriella. Her heir is the man to her right, and his heir is the man in the bottom left corner. Note that both men have only one consort's portrait beside them. Note also the skulls, denoting people who are dead.

Now we come to the fun stuff to do with Queen Beryl. The King who is murdered is the portrait in the lower right corner (I gave him the name of Osmund). Match King Osmund's portrait to the space for him in the puzzle (you can tell by the unique shape of each frame, for which portrait belongs where)... and you see two consorts' portraits. The one on top is a younger woman, who I gave the name Giselle, and you can see the skull that indicates she is dead. The one on the bottom is an older woman, who I gave the name Beryl, and she is the Queen in the game (not gonna spoil it as to what happens to her!) who instigates her own husband's murder.

Prince Thomas (the son of King Osmund and Queen Giselle, and father of the Heir) is the young, dark-haired man in the centre, and when you match him to his proper place in the puzzle, you see that he has a consort, Princess Rose, who is dead (she died in childbirth, when the Heir was born).

The final portrait has yet to be revealed in this screenshot, but will be very soon as the puzzle is completed in the game. Sir Edmund has a surprise coming when he figures this out.

None of the intricacies of the familial relations shown in this puzzle are actually discussed by any of the characters in the game. Nobody tells the Heir that the Queen is his step-grandmother, or even speculates why the Queen would decide to murder the King. This is something I've remedied in my story, because it's pretty damned important for the characters to figure out all this stuff so they know who the guilty parties are and have an idea as to why all of this was set in motion.

For that matter, there isn't even one syllable of dialogue in the game where anyone tells the Heir, "Oh btw, you know how you thought you were _______ all your life? Turns out you're not; you're really the late King's grandson, and since your father the Crown Prince died before you were born, that means you're really the King now."

It's one of those things that the player is meant to assume happened off-stage, which annoyed me, so I've written a few variants of possible scenes where this life-changing information is explained to him. And he does not take it lightly in any of them. When you've been part of a loving family and trained to know your place and temper your aspirations accordingly for 30+ years and you suddenly find out a huge part of it has been an elaborate lie (one perpetrated for your own safety, but nevertheless a lie), you're going to have mixed feelings about it at best.

I gave King Osmund a daughter as well, btw. She's not mentioned anywhere in the portrait puzzle because it only shows monarchs, their consorts, and their direct heirs. Princess Alicia (daughter of Osmund and Giselle, and sister of Thomas) was married off to the Crown Prince of Stormhaven (another kingdom I made up), and by the time of the game events, they have succeeded to the rulership of that kingdom. Queen Alicia has five children (3 boys, 2 girls), and I decided that the Heir having cousins who are also grandchildren of King Osmund would give him an incentive to do right by the kingdom so his out-of-kingdom cousins would not be able to swoop in and claim everything. Besides, it made sense that he might have previously-unknown family somewhere. I've written several different scenarios in which Queen Alicia is told that not only was her father (King Osmund) murdered, but her sons aren't going to inherit because surprise! there's a grandson with a direct claim that supersedes any others.

I rather like Queen Alicia. She's one of the more interesting characters I made up for this story, because she has to balance her loyalties to her husband and children in Stormhaven with her old loyalties to her father (she's devastated by King Osmund's murder), and her newfound liking and respect for the nephew she never knew she had, who is the new King.

I don't like her husband, King Charles, much. Of course he's got a legitimate concern that his oldest son is the heir to Stormhaven, but for the past three decades, he's expected that his second son would inherit Griffinvale, as the next-eldest male grandson of King Osmund (his father-in-law). So Charles isn't happy to find out he has a nephew-in-law with a better claim. He immediately starts hatching a plan to offer his youngest daughter to her newfound cousin as a wife, to consolidate the two kingdoms when they have children...

Except that's not gonna happen. Nope. No way. I have the Heir's wife picked out, and their children's names picked out. And since cousin marriages aren't a thing in Griffinvale, King Charles is going to be made rather emphatically aware of that.

Sounds like a soap opera, right? There's actually action going on as well, and I do have this AU version I'm writing that's not so compact and tied-up-with-a-ribbon as the game is. The AU version branches off when Sir Edmund (the POV character in the game) is killed, instead of rescued, and the story takes a sharp turn into much darker territory after that. The AU version is actually going to have the war that was avoided in the original game, and I'll have some hard decisions to make. Logically, all my favorite characters can't make it through, so it will be hard to decide who's going to die during this three-year in-universe timeframe (the events of the game itself happen over less than 24 hours).

 

[Zkribbler]

Someday, someone will post here.

 

[Valka D'Ur]

Others were always welcome to post here about NaNo-related things.

It's been stressful this time. I intended to have the story be about what happens after my character arrives in Ravensmoor.

Instead, after 45,000 words, he hasn't even arrived. What happened instead was that a flashback while on the ship to Ravensmoor morphed into relating what happened during his escape from the Tower in Griffinvale (I realized I hadn't written that part). It's violent, some (eventual) readers would find it disturbing, and I'm at a point where the story could go two different routes to the same eventual place where I've already written.

Choice #1: Do I go with my original 'assumption' of how the story went - straightforward (sorta) with the character making his way on his own to the residence where his best friend lives, sneaking in, contacting him, and getting help to escape the kingdom?

Choice #2: Do I go with a different scenario that popped into my head a few days ago that has him (while on the run - or stagger, more like, because he's in no physical condition to do any running) get lost and confused in the forest near the friend's home (this 'home' is a ducal mansion, btw; the friend is the heir to the Duke of Westmore), is found, brought to the ducal residence, and the story goes as originally planned... no matter which choice I use, they are going to help him get out of the kingdom. It's just a question of what happens during this whole escape.

I need to decide this today. On the one hand, #1 is how I've been assuming the story goes for a long time. On the other hand, #2 might be more realistic. In #1 the friend wasn't home at the time when my character sneaked in, and #2 explains why he wasn't home... and they just reunite sooner, out in the forest instead of at the residence.

The time of year is April, and I decided it's a late spring. Everything is still snowy, muddy, the rivers and streams are slushy, and it's chilly and raining (in short, like some of the April tail-end-of-winter situations we've had here some years; I decided this escape was going to be what most people would consider a miserable experience, but the character actually doesn't mind to be out in it because it's outside and he's at least temporarily free.

 

[Zkribbler]

Type, Valka, type!

 

[Chukchi Husky]

I ended up writing 57,008 words.

 

[Valka D'Ur]

I made it past 50,000 but it was a frustrating experience on the whole. It takes three times as long to write longhand as it does to type. About the only advantages there are to doing it in longhand is that the browser/computer can't eat it, and I can take a notebook and pen anywhere with me (not that I've gone too many places this year, but I always pack a notebook and pen anyway for occupying myself in waiting rooms and waiting for my bus).

I went with choice #2, and my character has been sneaking through secret passages in the prison (having found one in a privy next to the kitchen), got out of the Tower, out of the city, and has been wandering around a couple of forests for most of this month (RL time, not in-story time; in-story time has been about 8-9 hours).

He's about to meet up with a friend who will help him, but at the moment the friend doesn't know he's the one whose tracks were found in a suspicious place on the family property. The main character has been afraid all day of being recaptured, and when he hears horses and voices he thinks the guards have caught up to him.

The horses and voices belong to the people who will help him, once they realize he's their friend who they'd thought executed months before, and not a trespasser up to no good (they do nasty things to poachers and thieves in this century).

But at the moment I left off writing, everyone's still confused about who the others are, and I should really let them get un-confused fairly soon.

I need to research a couple of things to do better justice to this section, assuming I plan to keep it. It's annoying to look up the symptoms and treatment of hypothermia and find all kinds of 21st century methods of diagnosing and treatment options. I need to know what people would have done 1000 years ago.

 

[Zkribbler]

I salute all who finished this.

 

[Valka D'Ur]

Thank you, and likewise to my fellow writers.

As mentioned, this time didn't go well for me. I got the words, but not the actual story progress I wanted. I did a re-read of some old material from previous NaNo events, and they were honestly better. Part of the problem is that I have so much of the story I want to tell constantly running around in my mind and it takes a long time to get it down on paper. It's hard to do justice to the emotional aspect of this, while keeping in mind that while I know how certain situations are going to play out, and I need to remember that the readers and characters don't. A sense of suspense is lacking.

Right now I have characters who are going to meet up, neither knows the other - specifically - is out there, just that one is being chased and the other is doing the chasing. They have no idea that this is going to result in a happy reunion, but of course it's a situation that the reader can spot a mile off. I've been wondering if I should just go back to the original way I wrote this part of the story, where no chase happened.