Whoops! This was supposed to run last week, but somehow didn’t make it out of the “Draft” box of my blogging program. Anyway, I’ve got two things to talk about on WIP Wednesday today.
The first is “La Isla,” the NaNoWriMo project I did last month. I made it through 60K words by November 30th on a story based on a dream I had the month before. It was a weird, freaky dream, and the book looks like it’s going to be a weird freaky book. At this stage of the game, “La Isla” is really more outline than first draft of a novel. I hadn’t planned to do NaNoWriMo this year, so just jumped in with whatever idea I had on hand when November 1st came around. I do believe there’s a very interesting story in there. The novel will be, however, very experimental. Here’s a small sample of what I’ve written, unedited so far:
What is Flora’s first memory? That ought to be the first thing she talks about, the first thing she opens with. The beginning of chapter one. Most people can recall a time early on in their lives when they were children, like the day their mothers made them wear a horrible scratchy suit to church, or the time they wet their pants at Grandma Bingley’s funeral, right during the minister’s sermon, and it wasn’t their fault because no one would pick them up and take them to the bathroom even though they pleaded that they really, really had to go, and besides Grandma Bingley wouldn’t have minded, she would have taken the kid to the bathroom for Pete’s sake, just got up in the middle of the funeral and said, “Excuse me, but those of us still living have needs that must be attended to.” Whatever that meant. When you were only two or maybe three and still toilet training, you never really did get what adults were saying.
Like I said, at this point, it’s all notes and bits of dialog and occassional outright scenes, but mostly notes of what the story should look like. I’m well over 70K words, right now, and once I get the story settled in my mind, I’ll pull out the relevant parts of that very rough pre-first draft and begin the actual writing part of the process. But this pre-writing process is actually very important to me, and I’m happy with how it’s going.
In addition to “La Isla,” I’ve also been working with author Mark Jackman on a potential new web comic. We’re going to have to do a lot of prepatory work, figuring out the format, the story, the art, etc. But I spent all last week working on drawing a sample page based on a short script he sent me. Here’s a quick look at one of the panels.
I have no idea when we would be posting this on a regular basis. Right now Mark and I are just figuring out if we can even do this. We’ve both got very busy schedules. But Mark’s a very funny writer and I would be very happy to work on any project with him, so we’re going to see if we can make this work.
And that’s it for WIPs today, kids. If you have any comments or questions, let me know!
