NaNoWriMo 2017 - Update 2

NaNoWriMo 2017 - The End of the Beginning

I really enjoyed NaNoWriMo this year. I enjoyed it a lot.
It was the first year I intensively invested myself into writing in a very strict period of time.
Needless to say, it was a lot of fun, but at the same time, it was always whirring through my mind as I went about my daily regime. However, the word goal was always a big and foreboding beast. There was no way I was going to do 50,000 words in a month. But you know what? It was a good driving force.
In the end, I reached about 25,000 words, which is about halfway.
If NaNoWriMo was NaNoWriMo squared, then I would probably be lethargic about it and put it off until the end. But with the thirty days given, I was pretty chuffed with what I was able to achieve.
By November 30th this year, I was tapping away on my laptop the beginning words of the twelfth chapter as the clock ticked over midnight and into December. In front of me lay the scaffolding for my novel. It's by no means perfect, but I sure had a lot of fun with it and I will continue to do so.

Doctor... Who?

It's no secret that I'm a massive Whovian. And when I started NaNoWriMo, I had a lot of people ask whether it would be "the next Doctor Who," which I was apprehensive to do with my name attached.

For those who are unaware, a few years back, I was apart of a group called Illusionist Productions, which I founded, and it was a creative space to produce newfound ideas under the Doctor Who banner with our own different incarnations of the character.  Unfortunately, writing Doctor Who became a bit of a sour additive after some of the treatment I was receiving from others in that space, and stories I wrote for a long while after in the same genre felt one-dimensional and flat for this reason. 

But that aside, Doctor Who is something very much in my blood, and it's become almost impossible to avoid tropes of the program, such as wibbly-wobbly-timey-wimey or psychological horror concepts, which I adore. If you've never seen the show, the Weeping Angels are a great example of this.

When writing Phantasmagoria (my NaNoWriMo novel), some of these Doctor Who styles of writing started to bleed through to become apart of the story. I was unsure about how I felt about this at first, and tried my best to avoid being too Doctor Who-ish, but once I got to a certain point, I realised, if that's where it's heading, then there is no point in trying to avoid it but I should try and embrace it. 

Characters and Dream Scapes

In the middle of the month on one weekday, I sat down for my coffee break at my work.

One of the teachers who I work with introduced me to a publisher, who had writing experience of her own and had worked alongside some of my role models in the writing world. I was also comforted to be affirmed in two writing directions. The first being that a lot of plot devices in Phantasmagoria have been developed or conceived through dreams, which has been the method of several well-appreciated authors of our time. The other being that my characters have been based on individuals who I have either witnessed in passing or know very little of, that meaning that their is very little sentiment attached to that person. Endearment and sentiment can be two things that can hold a writer back from their characters and pushing them into unknown territory, so this has helped me greatly.

My main character, Hector, is based on a man who owns a shop (I won't say where to keep their reputation intact) who has a fantastical dress sense, much akin to something of a Tim Burton film costume department. Each time I have seen this person in public, they become more and more like the character in the real world and I imagine all the adventures that the real life Hector is getting up to.

The Future is Now

I am growing more eager by the moment for the future of Hector and Phantasmagoria. 

There is the intention of finishing it, but finding the perfect length for a teen novel is a tricky thing.

I have been dissecting books by the likes of Roald Dahl, Patrick Ness and JK Rowling, trying to find the perfect pace, page amount and range.

Visiting my local bookshop only a few weeks ago, my heart dropped as I saw a review for a new children's and teen novel. I picked up the book, read the blurb and thought to myself, this is exactly like mine. However, despite being bitter about this, I picked up a copy of myself and have started to read it, and in all honesty, it's fantastic. 

There is no hard feelings toward the author of this book because as I have read further, I have learned that this novel is very much a different version all-together of what I have created. Then again, I can't say they stole my idea, as it hasn't even been put out to the world to read. 

I will keep updating here on the progress of Phantasmagoria and I hope one day, just one day, to bring it to the bookshelves of Australia at the least, if not, the online e-book shelf.