NaNoWriMo 2007 - Day 27
Well, tonight ought to see me complete the first and rough as hell draft of Pieces, and it's been a curious journey. I had started out with a rough idea about a love triangle, and notions about characters being complicit in their own victimhood and to their own ends, and some nebulous stuff about a dangerous mumbo-jumbo taking over the United Kingdom included only to serve as some kind of backdrop to the present day events. By the end of this draft, though, the backdrop has stepped very much into the spotlight (broken metaphor, there) and all sorts of other business is now at work in the narrative - small actions having massive repercussions, the meaninglessness of freedom of will, disconnections between intent and effect, and more and surprising occurences of the jigsaw puzzle motif. Very late in the day I decided that if a weird brain-melting cult had taken over Britain, then there ought to be a resistence group, and given that the disbanded love triangle involved the narrator, who had nothing to do with either, it was pretty obvious where the other two ended up.
I'll be sitting down to chart out what I've written, see how it can be massaged to bring out and emphasise the stronger aspects of the story, and what other parts of the story need telling. So many of the late emergent elements need to be introduced earlier. Also, I'm going to have to cut the thing into 102 pieces that will each make a sort of sense on their own (though I have the beginnings of a strategy for that), and build a hideously bloated bit of JavaScript to put the whole thing together. I was tempted earlier today to devise 100 subtly different endings for the story, but that might be a bit too much. And as if to egg me on, I was in a bookshop the other day and saw Perec's Life: A User's Manual in the bestseller's section. Ah, nice.
Oh, and if the whole mess isn't too ghastly once I'm done, I shall be approaching a certain fictional anthology with a view to getting it published. I envision a box including a jigsaw puzzle and 102 bits of paper. Now that would be something. Oh, and a disc for the disinclined.
I'll be sitting down to chart out what I've written, see how it can be massaged to bring out and emphasise the stronger aspects of the story, and what other parts of the story need telling. So many of the late emergent elements need to be introduced earlier. Also, I'm going to have to cut the thing into 102 pieces that will each make a sort of sense on their own (though I have the beginnings of a strategy for that), and build a hideously bloated bit of JavaScript to put the whole thing together. I was tempted earlier today to devise 100 subtly different endings for the story, but that might be a bit too much. And as if to egg me on, I was in a bookshop the other day and saw Perec's Life: A User's Manual in the bestseller's section. Ah, nice.
Oh, and if the whole mess isn't too ghastly once I'm done, I shall be approaching a certain fictional anthology with a view to getting it published. I envision a box including a jigsaw puzzle and 102 bits of paper. Now that would be something. Oh, and a disc for the disinclined.
posted by Hamilton's Brain | 1:46 pm
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