Cat Vaccuum Go!

So it's nearly that time again.

Which would make this my third (!!) year participating - which was a horrible shock, let me tell you, when I went to the Maryland initial meet-up last Friday and realized I was the scarred and grizzled veteran. (Nobody should be getting advice on how to be resolute and responsible from me.) And now that I've finished two for two on wordcount without actually managing to reach the end of a damn storyline, I've made a couple of decisions this year to, as it were, increase the weight a bit.

First, just to get this out of the way: I won't be writing a Jenny Haniver story this year. I'll miss her, but I think comics is her natural medium, and I don't want to tell all her stories before we have a chance to get Adeptus off the ground. (Rest assured there will be future prose Jenny tales - though I think they may be shorter forms for a while. The big plot arcs I've outlined are graphic-novel ones.) And, too, I want to be sure that her first-person voice isn't any kind of crutch for me; I know I can write pages and pages of that, and I'm ready to try a different path this time around. And, besides, if all goes well, this year's tale will be so relentlessly cool that it won't be an issue.

Second, I likely won't be sending it out in installments as it happens. It's likely to be a much rougher draft this season, and I'll probably want to give it at least one revision before it's fit for human eyes. I may change my mind about this, depending on the demands of my Fawning Acolytes, but even then it'll probably be choice excerpts rather than the whole thing.

And this is because - Third - I'm really hoping to finish this one. As in, actually finish the story this month and not leave it hanging for frigging ever. Now that I know for certain I can write fifty thousand words in thirty days (with only minimal bouts of logorrhea and adjectivitis), this is obviously the new bar to set myself. So I'm very seriously considering writing from an outline, starting with a skeleton of plot and adding more flesh until it becomes, well, a novel. I've never done that before, and I don't know if it will happen as planned, but there's only one way to find out. This part frightens me more than anything else, but if it works, it may work better than anything else I've tried to produce a Real Novel with a beginning, middle and goddamn end.

So that's pretty much my November. I will, as usual, be giving updates here, and I apologize in advance if they make little sense. I'll be spending a great deal of next month's time with Moira Connor as she uncovers the mysteries of the city Night, and with Greyden Peregrine, the Brown Mug, Tass the Bravo, and the magician Caltaign, and probably forgetting in the thick of it that no one else has been there or met them yet.