I’ve posted the first of two parts of chapter 27 of The Ship of the Unforgotten. It’s the last part because this is the last contiguous piece of fiction I wrote for the Camp NaNoWriMo event in June; there’s more of the story written, but there’s a gap that I have to fill with new writing before I can post that, so it’s all new from here on out!
The Ship of the Unforgotten, Chapter 27
Two new chapters of The Ship of the Unforgotten are up tonight; links below. 25 is by far the shortest chapter I’ve written to date. 26 is of a more typical length. With 25 we return to Cobb’s part of the story, however briefly, and then 26 moves us back out to see how Dann and Rose are progressing.
The Ship of the Unforgotten, Chapter 25
The Ship of the Unforgotten, Chapter 26
In other news today I spent some time checking out Squarespace Version 6. It looks pretty promising and one day I might switch the sight over to that; right now I’m running Fiction Improbable on version 5. V6 has much better social integration, which I like a LOT, but it’s also highly template-based and you lose a lot of the ability to customize the templates that I love about V5. My ability to use 6 will probably depend on the availability of good templates, and right now the selection is thin, though the ones they have look fantastic.
Once I determined that I wouldn’t be making any sudden switches today, I did a bit more work on this version of the site. I’ve gone back and corrected tags and categories for all the posts in the Draft Stories section.
I’ve also converted the Draft Stories link into a menu. It’ll take you to one of two places for right now.
One is a page of links to all of the draft stories I’ve posted, which’ll make them MUCH easier to find. Sorry it’s been such a mess for so long!
The other is to the typical blog view of the draft stories, with one story per page, currently counting in at 14 total.
I do plan to come up with a similar solution for the Fiction Fragments section, but I now have the better part of a year’s worth of daily writing in there so fixing all of those tags and categories could be… fun. Wish me luck on that!
I’m going to be performing some much-needed reorganization of the site over the next while, hopefully just the next day or two. The biggest change is going to be immediately obvious to visitors of the front page; I’m putting the former “Blog” section front and center as the welcome to the site.
Beyond this though, I’m going to be making a point of posting to the blog on a more consitent basis, and I’ll also be working on a way to make finding the latest draft of specific stories easier.
I think tomorrow will be the first posting of new material from the book. I’ve started recutting sections and arranging them to where they make the most sense from a narrative point of view.
Unlike just about everything I’ve written and posted here before, this book is long enough to have a few different viewpoints represented, so keeping the chronology straight is more of a challenge than I’ve faced before. It’s a fun one though, and I learned a lot about my personal writing process in doing this book. I’m definitely doing another book next month. And I’m definitely pre-planning it this time.
Yes, my 50,000 words are complete and my first successful Camp NaNoWriMo is behind me. My next is coming up soon though, I think I’m going to be crazy enough to do August as well.
Just because the challenge is over doesn’t mean the book is though. In the end, I had a LOT of writing to do really quickly. I wrote more than 11,000 words on the last day alone, and more than 6,000 the day before. In order to do all that writing that quickly, I worked on chunks of the book that I could spit out really fast, and wrote a lot of free-form brainstorms to keep the plot straight and make sure things made sense.
What I ended up with are lots of individual chapters that jump around crazily through time, which I need to put in their proper chronological order and then read over for flow and consistency, as well as write any gap-filler which may be needed (and it will be needed) to stitch the different pieces together as one.
Basically this means that for tonight, I’m a little bit brain dead and will not be posting a new chunk of the book. That can wait for tomorrow. For now, hooray! I’m done. Until August.