Woohoo! I have successfully written 50,000 words in the month of April, completing my 38th writing challenge (counting November Nanowrimos, April/July Camp Nanos, and Script Frenzy).
This was a pretty rough Nanowrimo, given the prepwork that I had to do ahead of Clockwork Alchemy.
But, I did it, and learned so much about my story and the overall arc of the series as well. So, huzzah!
So, I am really churning with the edits on this one, but here's a segment which is relatively coherent:
The trim, egg-headed man emerged from Air Force One like royalty, the crowds of military personnel actually cheering him as he descended. At his heels, a lantern-jawed, white-haired man followed, grinning broadly, waving awkwardly at troops that seemed to like him even more.
Both kept smiling as they strode towards Jeremiah, but their body language …
“Oh, my,” Jeremiah said. “They hate each other, don’t they?”
“Now, that,” Marcus said, “is an understatement.”
The pair stopped twenty meters from Jeremiah, on one side of a rough ring of Secret Service agents that made Jeremiah feel like she’d just entered a gladiatorial arena; she wondered what the agents thought they would do if the Scarab decided to go all apocalyptic on them.
“So,” the President said. “You’re … Commander Willstone, correct?”
“Sir, yes sir,” Jeremiah clicked her heels, watching, without appearing to watch, a larger group of dignitaries forming up just outside the ring of Secret Service agents. “I am Senior Expeditionary Commander Jeremiah Willstone, and I am at America’s service, sir.”
“Are you?” the President said. “I hear that you gave our security detail some trouble.”
“I heard that too,” the challenger said. “I notice you refused to be disarmed.”
Jeremiah nodded; her blunderblast remained slung over her back.
“My people use nonlethal weapons,” Jeremiah said, “even this impressive blunderblast, which I will demonstrate later. From a security perspective, however, consider it just show: I’m the weapon. If I had wanted to blow up your plane, I would just have pointed at it.”
The President shifted, just slightly, but the challenger grinned.
“Will you demonstrate that for us later?” he asked.
“Er—yes,” Jeremiah said. “Of course, sir—”
“Not on my plane,” the President said.
“Ah!” Jeremiah said. “No, of course not, sir. I’ll use our psychic’s car instead—”
“Commander!” the Owl said. “I just got—you’re kidding. Tell me you’re kidding—”
Jeremiah Willstone and the Watchtower of Destiny
Oh my. I hope they manage to convince each other to work together without blowing anything up.
Nevertheless ... viiictory!
Onward.
-the Centaur
SO! Once again, I have written more than 50,000 words in a month - this time, on Dakota Frost #7, SPIRAL NEEDLE, which is close to being finished. (Yes, yes, YES, I know, Dakota Frost #4-#6 and Cinnamon Frost #1-#3 are not edited yet, editing is harder than writing, and pays less than teaching robots to learn. I'll get to them, I'll get to them, I promise). I can't figure out the new Camp Nano interface to make it cough up the usual winner banner, so you'll just get that screenshot instead.
This is my twenty-ninth victorious Nano challenge and thirty-first attempt overall. That's great stick-to-it-ness, but I was behind for much of the month, not getting my feet under me until the 10th, but I managed a big pushes two weekends a go and a huge push last weekend, leading to me briefly getting ahead of the game right around the 28th, making today an easy coast (1500 words finished me off, though I wrote through to a notch over 1,667 words just for completeness). According to my records, that 8,154 word push on the 25th was the second most I've ever written in a day, topped only by my 9,074 word mad push to finish PHANTOM SILVER, Dakota Frost #5, on July 30th, 2016.
Overall, a bit behind this month, which was pretty rough OKR (Objective / Key Result) planning at work. I love the IDEA of OKRs - say what you want to do (Objective, for example, write roughly 1/3 of a novel) and how to measure it (Key Result, for example, 50,000 words in the month of April), but this time it took us until almost the 20th. 3 weeks is way too long to spend on planning for a quarter's worth of effort.
OH, almost forgot, an excerpt:
Quick sketch of H.P. Lovecraft. Not ... terrible ... per se, but I squashed his head, and there's something about the face that's wrong that also bothers me about the faces drawn by Steve Dillon in Preacher. Don't get me wrong - I love Preacher and Steve Dillon's art, but something has always struck me as slightly off about the faces in Preacher, and the same thing is going on here. If I knew what it was, I could probably fix it. But I don't, so I guess I just have to keep practicing.
Drawing every day.
-the Centaur
P.S. 1800 words. Getting back on track on Nano.