NaNoWriMo Challenge

[SoftGameHunter]

This will be interesting. In the past, I've outlined my NaNoWriMos to within an inch of their lives, with exact chapter descriptions completed before November starts. Not this time. I've got three and a half pages of rough outline and less than one week to expand it.

Maybe it will work out better in the long run. I need to practice description, which tends to be minimalist in most of my works. Minimalist being code for lazy and non-descriptive description. Consequently, I end up with lots of dialogue and tons of events, turning into a literary maelstrom if I'm not careful. A low stakes effort will make a good chance to practice a bit.

Anyone want to share their blurb? I'm putting together a futuristic sci-fi crime noir story about a young woman who was subjected to some involuntary sexual medical procedures and is now out for her idea of justice. I haven't tried a significant noir work before. I usually go for something more absurdist, so this should be fun for everyone. Well, except for most of the characters in the book. We shall see.

[RapeU]

I find it easier to interweave dialogue with descriptions. Descriptions between a few lines of dialogue allows the dialogue to breathe a bit.

[Shocker]

@SoftGameHunter concerning minimalist description we have an entire thread on that. I don’t consider a minimalist description as the lazy approach. I larggely follow there the philosophy employed by JK Rowling in the Harry Potter books, if you try yo think really hard, you’ll find that most characters are described only with 3 attributes. We know that Hermione Granger has bushy, brown hair and large teeth. If you try to look up her eye color, you won’t find a thing, neither about her height or chest development. Harry is gangly, black unruly hair, glasses, green eyes and the lightning scar, knobbly knees. That’s only 6 attributes for the protagonist of a 7 book series.

What I’m trying to say is, minimalist description is getting the job done, the readers brain will fill in all the necessary details, in a much more satisfying way than I ever could. Lazy is if one doesn’t stop to think, if the description is sufficient for the character in question.

[Blue]

I've finally decided to try my luck in this competition. The framework is already in place. It's a story set in March 1945, shortly before the end of the war, taking place in and around Prague.
The idea offers material for a great story. But will I actually manage to write 50,000 words? I don't know.
I'll write the story in German first and then try to translate it into English. I hope Google Translate will help.
And yes, part of the story will fit in here on the board. Because if I don't manage to finish the story in its entirety, I'll publish it as a multi-part series in the rape stories section here on the board.
May Orpheus be with me.

In about three hours I will start to write my story.

[SoftGameHunter]

I guess I'll find out if this is going to work. I don't have my usual chapter outline ready, so this one may not be fully to my liking. On the other hand, pantsing can produce some wonderful diversions and new directions, but at the cost of speed (and coherency). I guess I'll find out.

[SoftGameHunter]

So how is this one working out for everyone? I've been posting chapters as I go. Charitably, folk seem to be waiting for more to go up before commenting or rating. That's cool, though. You don't want to give three thumbs up based on one chapter of twenty or thirty. Will anyone else post as they go?

I laugh at myself. Paltry as my outline was, I already deviated from it in chapter 1 and now I have to fill in plot holes on the fly. So unless I include a nunnery or a Jewish money lender, this won't be Shakespeare.

[Vela Nanashi]

I have not started yet, I hope to soon

[Shocker]

So how is this one working out for everyone? I've been posting chapters as I go. Charitably, folk seem to be waiting for more to go up before commenting or rating. That's cool, though. You don't want to give three thumbs up based on one chapter of twenty or thirty. Will anyone else post as they go?

I laugh at myself. Paltry as my outline was, I already deviated from it in chapter 1 and now I have to fill in plot holes on the fly. So unless I include a nunnery or a Jewish money lender, this won't be Shakespeare.

I finally started writing, but don't want to post anything before I have at least five chapters down

[RapeU]

I've added the NaNoWriMo tag category for those who are going to post something for the contest.

[LtBroccoli]

So how is this one working out for everyone? I've been posting chapters as I go. Charitably, folk seem to be waiting for more to go up before commenting or rating. That's cool, though. You don't want to give three thumbs up based on one chapter of twenty or thirty. Will anyone else post as they go?

I laugh at myself. Paltry as my outline was, I already deviated from it in chapter 1 and now I have to fill in plot holes on the fly. So unless I include a nunnery or a Jewish money lender, this won't be Shakespeare.

So far, so good. I'm trying to keep pace of 1700 words per day. Right now I'm about a day behind on that goal, but I just got to an interesting point in the story. Probably got through about 4k today after putting aside some time to dive in.

I tried using Scrivener for this story, but I had a bad experience where it deleted about 3 hours of work with a botched copy-paste that Undo decided to not undo. So I'm back to Pages on the Mac and Notes on the phone for writing.

One thing that has helped so far is I've started using ChatGPT to do the "bullshit research" tasks. For example, I needed to invent a college. Natalie opens the story living in the dorms of a religious school, but I never invented one in this universe. After a few prompts, I was able to get it to generate just enough background details to make it plausible on the surface. While I was typing this up, I used it to research an approximate price for a piece of real estate from 30 years ago. Google of 2015 would give me an answer in about 2 minutes. I could look through the county property tax records and spend an hour or two on that detail, but all I need is a rough figure. Modern Google is next to useless for this task, but the AI pulled out a bullshit answer close enough to good enough for this tale.

Anyone else doing things like this?