NaNo Blogging: Starting Over, Again

In case you missed it yesterday, I've decided to scrap the novel I've been working on this November in favor of another one. The outline for which I discovered as if guided by the hand of fate (And not apathy.) over my break this weekend. It's a drastic step and one that took me a bit of gearing up to take, took a lot of self-convincing that this was NaNo and I needed to let my insanity reign, but, in the end, it was an easy choice to make. I want to write a complete novel this month and the way things were going with Stalking the Wolf I just wasn't going to make it. It's the kind of story where I could write 2~3k a day for a year (That's about a million words for all the math challenged out there.) and maybe, maaaaaybe, polish it off. Which, you know, maybe I will one day. For now, though, I set my sights too high and I need to readjust them downwards.

The current novel is tentatively entitled Winter Falls (Very tentatively. Don't get me wrong, I think that's a kick ass title, but I'm not sure if it fits this story just right yet. I'd like to do something with candles as symbology but, somehow, I don't think Alright, Let's Light This Damn Candle! works right, either. Still, both options are better than the one in my notes, The Last Seeress. Way to fantasy cliche.), a stirring tale of high fantasy played out along a moving backdrop the details of which I won't bore you with. Yet. I need to save some content so I can keep this blogging machine humming along, you know.

Suffice to say that it's considerably smaller in scope than the previous one. Which isn't saying much since Stalking the Wolf is about a globe spanning world war and the events that lead to it turning unexpectedly hot. Cast of thousands, massive budget overruns, director returned a nine-hour cut when he got back from the editing bay. It is long. Winter Falls, on the other hand, is smaller, simpler. My cast list doesn't extend to triple digits, for example. But it still feels like a novel. Like it's a story worth writing. And that's important because otherwise, I just wouldn't be interested in writing it.

I guestimate that it'll take about 75k to get from the beginning to end. That's including a prolog to establish some characters that I'm not going to write just yet in favor of starting further ahead in the story. If I have time, I can go back and add it in. But I want to get into the meat of the tale and start chugging away before I get bogged down in exposition and foreshadowing again.

Now, it might seem crazy to roll the word counter back to zero and start from scratch nearly halfway through the month. Especially with Thanksgiving and the rest coming up which will only further bite into my writing time. But you have to take into consideration that I can write. A lot. I've been averaging about 5k a day. With 16~17 days left, that should be just enough time to come in under the wire. And, should I happen to get enthusiastic about it all and start dropping 10k days like mana from the heavens, well, it's well within my reach.