Hurrah for NaNo — now I’ll get some real work done!

I think I’ll get a lot more writing done next month, thanks to NaNoWriMo.

And no, I’m not participating.

It seems that every writer and his/her cat will be doing NaNoWriMo this year.  Certainly most, if not all, of the writers whose blogs I follow will be.  Working on a novel, frantically trying to write 1667 or more words every day, means less time and energy left over for blogging.  Less blogging from them means I don’t have as much to keep up with during November, and that means I should have more time to work on my own stories.

Yesterday, although I didn’t put many words on the page, I did get some work done on that ‘flashback’ sequence I keep trying to finish (and which keeps kicking my ass because every time I attempt to write part of it, I ‘fall into character’ too far and just want to avoid the whole situation), and I’m happy with how that’s going — or rather, I’m happy with the amount of progress I’m making, if you understand the difference.  I’m also making progress in figuring out exactly what I want to keep and what I want to change for “that novel” to make it fit with stuff already written that happens afterward.  There are still incongruities in the plot… *sigh*  It probably won’t fall together properly until the parts of the backstory being written right now — a major character in “that novel” is also  a major character in The Madness Engine (*quotes line from Mulan about ‘all grown up and destroying people’*) — are finalized, because “that novel” happens after The Madness Engine (even though The Madness Engine takes place in the 30th century, and “that novel” is in the early 22nd — and remember, there’s no time travel in these stories).

Of course, I’ll also be working on my clone’s stories.  He’s more than 30K words into The Madness Engine now (*mutters something about ‘reading ahead’ and then laughs insanely*), and yesterday he said he wants to get a few short stories/excerpts ready to post on his blog soon, which means I’ll be doing a final pass for proofreading and minor edits.  One of those stories is an out-take from The Fallen, removed because it was one sub-plot too many in a novel that was already pushing 150K words, and another is an excerpt from The Madness Engine.  (*eagerly anticipates making Loyal Reader say “eep!”*)  There may also be short stories about Hrothgar Tebrey that fill in spaces between novels, but I don’t know which of those my clone wants to post.