#talysnovel: snow to ashes

[talysalankil]

making a minor character like

[talysalankil]

have 3k words to write today for nanowrimo and tbh i’m like

on the positive side: i think i had a breakthrough like ten minutes ago in terms of defining character motivation! that’s neat. i just need to find a way to execute that well. no biggie. no pressure. cool cool cool

[talysalankil]

ayyyy look at that, i might actually salvage this nanowrimo yet, crazy how much easier it goes when i’m not constantly being told to redo my class preps. i mean it’s not exactly a certainty that i’ll hit 50k yet but it feels feasible at least.

also yeah, still on the nonlinear writing train. i don’t know why it’s suddenly working for me when i’ve been reticent to it for so long. I’ll take it. i’m not going to question it. or what it’ll mean for the future of my writing.

[talysalankil]

nano update:

i’m slowly crawling my way back up to my “good” average of ~1.5k/hour, and also today was my best day words-wise, so, neat

also I managed to sneak in the “protagonist and love interest’s first interaction is a duel” trope. i have no regrets. also alex is basically insta-smitten with emi when she kicks his ass because he’s a disaster bi* who just needs someone to step on him

*emi is genderfluid and at that point presenting as…let’s say male-adjacent. i considered having her switch pronouns too but honestly I think that’s just confusing for the reader especially for one of my protags and PoV, so i’ve been sticking with she/her pronouns.

[talysalankil]

nanowrimo update: i did 1717 words today, which isn’t great considering i should have done 1 or 2 sprints during the afternoon but didn’t so I should have done a lot more.

But on the optimistic side I got some cool character stuff going there with one of my protags and her supporting cast. Which is totally not influenced by heartsong at all (which I just finished a couple days ago and I’m still heartbroken by, btw).

Anyway I think I’ll keep going on my momentum for a tiiiiny bit longer

[talysalankil]

i do wish i could have outlined more. this is a story with two protagonists and so far i’ve only gotten half of one’s intro scene while the other has gotten a lot more. it’s annoying. but…oh well, I guess.

[talysalankil]

so.

I chose my project for nanowrimo.

it’s gonna be snow to ashes.

whoo.

i’ll probably make some blogging about it later because i ended up starting at like, fifteen to midnight and it’s now 2am.

[talysalankil]

i guess they removed the validation step? neat

[talysalankil]

i feel like at some point post-nanowrimo i’ll have to face the fact that I should basically rebuild one half of this story from the ground up because if i feel bored with that protagonist’s storyline while writing it it’s probably not great to read about either

[talysalankil]

i can’t believe-

seriously i’m so tired i didn’t think i’d make 3k today. if i keep this up i can actually still win nanowrimo? holy shit that would be crazy though.

what happened was, I had a random urge to write nonlinearly, so i did a bunch of drafts of scenes later in the story and it worked really well. plus, doing that helps in an unexpected way since now I have a clearer idea where i’m going and i can basically reverse engineering how to get from point A to point B. i mean, it’s still hard, but still.

on an unrelated note: the curse of “confusing characters whose name starts with the same letter” strikes again, and this time, the characters are the protagonist’s brother and her love interest, so that’s kind of unfortunate lmao

[talysalankil]

got my best sprint yet, 1257 words in 35 minutes. I almost forgot that i actually really like emotional talks? even if i’m more used to do it with angsty gays. which, i guess they are angsty gays, but of the found family type, not the “want to bang” type. anyway. it was good.

so sad I can’t carry on this momentum because i have more internship shit to deal with and then classes

[talysalankil]

i’m gonna have to write romantic tension tomorrow! wish me luck i have no idea if i can manage this

[talysalankil]

day 3 update: wrote a bunch more (more than either day before), cool cool. hopefully i don’t lose that headstart now that the work week is starting.

i'm actually developing a bit of an outline as I go, which is neat because it allowed me to write a liiiittle bit nonlinearly as my two protags haven't met yet. I don't generally like nonlinearity but it works in this case, and i can write faster when my focus is on one of them

also yeah i should at some point talk about, like, plot or characters, but i’d like to do that when i’m not exhausted, and it’s midnight and i have to be up in like 6 hours, so today is not that day.

[talysalankil]

okay i did it, some results were very cursed to the point where i don't even want to post them, but here are some highlights

under a cut because i know neural blender images make ME uncomfortable a lot of the time and i don't want to expose anyone to that on here

FTEITS books 1, 2 and 4. book 3's title is tentative and the results it yielded were bad, like, bad enough i'm seriously thinking about scrapping the title. especially because book 3 has radically changed since i came up with the title so it's as good a reminder as any to think about it

Snow To Ashes, the in-universe book the FTEITS protags are fans of, which I tried writing for nanowrimo 2019. It's like, Mulan in a futuristic north pole. Yeah this slaps imo.

Eloped in the Night / Brooding Lust, the fic that became that book. The former is like, i get why the bot did this since the title is kinda misleading on purpose. The latter i have no idea what it is but i feel it

Dragged To The Underworld is another one where like, yeah. wrong kind of underworld, but B for effort (I don't know letter grades don't @ me)

Tbh i was so used to last year's nanowrimo book's codename "Precursors" that I forgot i gave it an official title "Written in the Stars - Unearthed" (the idea being that "unearthed" is the book title, wits is the series title, but for some reason i think of them as a unit). Not literally super representative but i like what it's putting down.

Tangled Stars is probably the most fitting one? Like, I could see myself (in the hypothetical future where it gets published) going "yeah make this the basis for the cover art". a tree made of stars is literally what i had in mind when coming up with this title.

The Horned Prince is another one I really like (it was actually the first i tried since it's my current wip and why i did all the others). Like. Yann owns a cape that could look like the non-AI-eldritch version of this. I love it. I don't know why the hollow knight face snuck in here though.

Rejected were Malefacta, which is honestly the most cursed one, and Psychopomp, which admittedly did get a biblical angel mood appropriate for the book but also I hate looking at it.

what if. i just tossed my book titles into neural blender

[talysalankil]

No word count update because i forgot to take a screenshot before i manually hit reset on scrivener but it went well basically, except for the aforementioned “i need to rewrite a solid 30% of what i have right now” thing

[talysalankil]

okay well 3.8k at midnight is my final count for today. I kinda wanted a little more to catch up to par but i needed the rest and this is still good

hopefully i can keep this up? i absolutely need to if i want any chance of catching up especially with my internship looming over me soon. on the optimistic side: i have some idea where i want the next few scenes to go. on the pessimistic side: after that I’ll only have some very high level ideas again and i’ll be back to building the tracks right in front of the train. wish me luck.