Welcome to the haphazard posting of the world/plot/story-building for my 2016 NaNoWriMo Novel! In which my Fictives and their Writer attempt to shape the rough outline of a story from the void. All of which will probably be tossed out the window when November 1st hits, but… that’s half the fun, right? 😉
This is shameless MuseFic, so there will be snark and world-building and lots of spoilers. Of course there is also a very good chance that the November story will ignore most of the spoilers, so it’s probably a 40-60 chance at best.
You have been warned…
Post Wordcount: 826
Total Wordcount: 1,604
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“I need fictives.” The Writer stared at her general plot doodles in annoyance. “I have a setting and a general idea of what they are going to be doing, but no one to do the doing.”
“Who do you want to read about then,” the Muse didn’t look up from her tablet this time, having resigned herself to being dragged along on the NaNo adventuring. “And remember, when all else fails fancasting is the answer.”
“Hmm, what are some fun cliches…” The Writer almost clicked her TV Tropes bookmark, but that way lay madness. Madness and many many hours of engrossing clicking. “Young kids who are the chosen one, old grizzled veterans with hearts of gold, villains that kick puppies, wisecracking kickass females hovering just shy of Mary Sues, handsome rogues, redeemable fallen angels, false psychics, ghosts, AIs, aliens that are inhuman, aliens that are people painted green, the person will all the common sense that no one else listens to, the everyman reader self-insertion character, umm.. Talking animals!”
The Muse put down her tablet.
“What? Too much?”
“Are you going to turn this into another giant patchwork of storylines like you did with The Sundering?” The Muse glared.
“Um… no?”
The glare intensified.
“Noooooo…. Yes. Yes, I am.” The Writer hung her head in shame.
“Pick one. Just one.” The Muse growled. “You can add all the rest of them in later, but I am not spending all of October wading through character development on a cast of thousands.”
The Writer sighed.
Dramatically.
The Muse was unimpressed.
“Alright, fine, fine. One… eh, I pick the villain. I haven’t written from that POV in a long while.” She looked over her choices of archetypes. “Someone not too horribly evil, just pragmatic and unconcerned with the other offspring of humanity. He’s evil, but it’s not personal.”
“Sounds like a lovely person to spend 50,000 words on.”
“Well he’s a starting point, I’m sure he’ll grow on you.” The Writer expanded on her doodle outline. “I don’t know if I want to give him a redemption arc, we’ll see how he acts once he wakes up on the ship.”
“Dare I ask what he was doing before he was villian-napped?” The Muse was trying very hard not to be alarmed at the direction November was headed. “I don’t suppose he’s an investment banker or somesuch?”
“Hmm, something where interacting directly with the public wasn’t required. Something powerful enough to give him complete control over his own life. Maybe something where he was working remote the entire time, where he’d be doing contract work to his own timetable and rules.”
“If you say he writes books for a living I’m going to kill you.”
“I was halfway thinking he’s one of those self-help gurus who makes a living getting other people to pay him money to tell them how to live their lives. But if he did that he’d have to run classes and give talks and that is so not him. So maybe…” The Writer started fading out of sight.
There was a long pause.
“Oops.” The Writer appeared back at her desk with a pop.
“You got sidetracked looking at self-help books didn’t you.” The Muse sighed. “Did you learn nothing from that one Camp NaNo where you tried to read ‘how to write’ books and write at the same time? One brain kid, you have one brain.”
“To be fair, I got distracted reading posts about how to write NaNo novels,” the Writer said sheepishly. “Apparently the way I’m going about this is all wrong.”
“You always go about this wrong,” the Muse pointed out, with amused resignation. “But you have all sorts of weirdly unconnected worlds out of it, so even if this fails at least you have a new place to play.”
“NaNo worlds are summer homes and I’m bad at taking vacations.” The Writer poked her doodle outline. “But this will be a one-shot mess, after this I’m not coming back to the world. That said, I think I want to try and print it out as I go, just for moral support.”
“And the fun of having a book you can lob at people when they ask you what you’re doing.” The Muse rolled her eyes.
“That too!” The Writer grinned.
“Assuming you hit fifty thousand words, that’s a hefty pile of paper.”
“Eh, it’s the rough draft, so most of it is just going to be stuff I’ll have to cut out again later.” The Writer doodled robots in the margins of her outline. “To be honest, I’m tempted to do another MuseFic just so I can keep things somewhat coherent as I print them out. I can still jump around in the story with my normal chaos, but I can make notes on where things go and why.”
“Do I get to point out that the previous attempts at MuseFic books didn’t get finished either?”
“No.”
“Fair enough.”
“Onwards!”