It was good enough for Scheharazade.

I am about to pull the cheapest Nanowrimo stunt I have yet to pull in 2 and a half years of competing. The Instant Ninjas have NOTHING on this. (Actually, I really liked last year's Instant Ninjas. I am going to keep the Instant Ninjas in the final draft of Complications of Lycanthropy if it is at all possible.)

First, little backstory. Going into this, I had four story possibilities. The next volume of my Fushigi Yuugi AU, a light steampunk thing, a 'fantasy hidden in real world' deal with Immortals, or this light superheroic thing.
I made the wrong call. Stories are kind of like fruit; they're best if you get them when they're ripe. You can pick them too early; you can let them ripen too long. I picked this one too early.

As a result, I am not having a whole lot of fun. My excitement fizzled after scene two, and it has been a major slog every day. This is not how Nano should go. Nano is supposed to: week one I'm bouncing on the walls thrilled, week two I'm still excited but starting to get angst puppies, week 3 I'm whining like a spoiled toddler, and week 4 I'm doing a happy dance across the finish line.
That's not going to happen with this story. At best I'm going to have a miserable month, at worst the angst puppies are going to maul it to death.

On top of that, this morning I picked up volume one of my FY AU and read a bit, and you know what? That's good stuff. That looks like fun. I shoulda done that one.

So you know what I'm going to do? Mercy, my female Superhero High lead, is going to go home and find that her mother has bought her the latest few tankobon of her favorite manga series. So she is going to sit down for a lazy Saturday of reading Fushigi Yuugi: Ruby Veil and Fushigi Yuugi: Sapphire Veil, and I am going to start writing FY stuff.

I get to keep my 10,000 hard won words, and I get to write something that actually excites me and sounds fun. And if I later decide that FY isn't working after all or this stunt is just TOO cheap, Mercy puts down the tankobon, meets with a friend, and we flash back to chapter 2 and retell the story from her point of view, because I honestly think it'll work better that way. It was originally told from the POV of my male lead, Reno, with the intent of dropping an Everyman into this weird environment and having him learn how to deal with it and eventually find his inner hero. Yeah, that fell flat on its face. Everymen are BORING. Now I really think it would work better to start from the POV of the 16-year-old deep undercover international law enforcement agent *cough* yes it works in story I swear *cough* finding out a new potential cover blower is coming to her school and being right in the thick of all the intrigue right from the start.

Nano participants reading this are saying "sounds normal to me. Go for it."

Well, that set in earlier than usual

Waaah! My Nano sucks, and it's always gonna suck and it's never gonna be any good! Waah!

It is, however, going to be 50,000 words, and that's all that freakin' counts. So nyah! ;P

3672 words and counting.

We are officially live.

The Nitpickers' Guide to Highlander now officially has a new home at its own subdomain: http:\\www.highlander.jinnayah.com . The old page has been removed except for a link to the new.

Part and parcel with that is a new episode riffing: Something Wicked.

And for those keeping score, my new general page is at www.jinnayah.com . Right now it has basically the same stuff, except less of it. Better organized, though. :)

How the heck did that happen?

Now that I've finished the first draft of Complications From Lycanthropy, I'm going back to do revisions on Pack Mentality. (It actually doesn't need nearly the rewrite I feared it would at the end of October, when I finished it.)

One of the things I've done is to read back through it and make note of the changes I want to make in each chapter. As part of that, I also made out a timeline of what events happen when, so I can get weather and stuff reasonable and as a general guide. That's not too hard when the characters' lives revolve around the full moon, so most of the events are nicely laid out in relation to one.

Now, one of my frustrations when first writing this is that it's supposed to be following Remus during the first half of Half-Blood Prince, between when Harry saw him in July and then again in December. Only when I'd laid out my brainstorming of how much time happened between events, it just wouldn't squish in there. So I decided screw it, I wasn't going to sacrifice the integrity of my story to squeeze into a canon I didn't particularly like anyway, and just wrote it as it needed to be written.

Now that I've gone back and written out the actual timeline, it drops in perfectly. It starts August 28 and ends a couple of weeks before Christmas. I have no idea how the hell that happened, but it works.

I also am again convinced that Rowling did not consult a lunar calendar in regards to her werewolf character's appearances.

Yay! It's finished!

Finally finished the first draft of Complications From Lycanthropy. Naturally, it's very much a first draft -- a terrible mess that will bear hardly any resemblance at all to draft 2. Now I'm very glad I didn't let many people read draft 1. But I've got all the critical flashbacks well laid out now, and even though the frame story will drastically change, I do have the most important incidents there as well. Go me!

Since the last chunk is all hand-written in notebooks, my plan from here is to spend my usual writing time typing it up, and then switching over to Pack Mentality and starting the first major revision on that story. Not only does that give Complications time to rest, but events in the two stories are shared and influence each other, so having the first draft of Complications done gives me a better idea of how some things should go in Pack Mentality.