I am a surprised and somewhat confused writer at the moment. I have no idea what to say about anything and after writing 5k today to hit the goal I'm not sure the 'random word vomit' function is working well enough to pull out a blog post.
Anyway, 50k. According to the first draft I'm a whisker under halfway through the story. According to my vague intention of doing a lot more expansion in the second and third sections of the story, I'm probably somewhere around a quarter of the way through. According to my goal of making this draft 150k, I've just hit 1/3. Well... technically I did that when I hit 50k on the draft the day before yesterday. I started NaNo with 8k already written. I know, bad me - continuing a WIP instead of starting from scratch.
Now to attempt some random word vomit:
I have one serious, worrying problem with the story at the moment. Yes, just one. All the other problems are either not that serious or not that worrying. The serious, worrying problem is this:
Marihan the Fire Demon is a total moron.
Seriously, he's an idiot. He's the closest things to a god the world has ever had and he can't see what's right under his nose. I could live with that if it was an honest character quirk like his inability to remember anyone's name for more than about ten seconds, but some of the things he's ignoring just aren't plausible. If he really was the character I think he is, he would have noticed more stuff.
For example, fifteen years ago a capsule washed up on the beach and a bunch of guys opened it and discovered a baby demon. They decided to raise her until she was old enough to be used to trigger the Apocalypse, but another bunch of guys decided to sneak into their secret base and 'rescue' the demon. She was a nine year old girl at this time, so wanting to rescue her made total sense if you're the kind of character who cares about kids and can't say no to an adventure.
Anyway, there was a battle and the demon child ended up unleashing a cyclone that killed a lot of people and permanently altered a section of coast. The demon was the only survivor and she was picked up by a bunch of random guys who weren't very nice, but that's another story. The important points here are: a demon child manipulated the weather and destroyed a section of the continent...
...and Marihan didn't notice? If he's that apathetic, how did he manage to drag himself out of bed to get involved in the story? I think Demon Boy and I need to have a serious talk about what he's actually been doing all this time. He should have been poking his nose into every interesting event of the last 235 years. More to the point, he should know about that demon child and how she's connected to what's happening right now. There are things happening right under his nose and every reason in the world why he should be noticing them.
Maybe he has noticed and he just has some kind of weird only-makes-sense-to-him reason why he refuses to let on that he knows anything. Like I said, Demon Boy and i are going to have to sit down and have a serious talk about some things.
Hmm... I guess my 'random word vomit' function is unimpaired after all.
Yes, characters do tend to be a bit dull at this point. Either they don't notice things, because they don't understand why they need to yet, or they notice far too much on their own, because the plot clues to egg them on haven't been planted yet. Sometimes, when that happens to me, it's a sign that the plot/world/motivation needs to be more complex, because my mind instinctively simplifies things that are too nebulous for it to understand. =P
ReplyDeleteIt'll resolve itself later. :-)