Nano Day 12

Today's Words: 0
Month to Date: 20041
 
It's official: I'm starting over on this novel.
 
I'm not scrapping everything I've written, though. Hell, no.
 
Today I continued what I started yesterday, which is going back over my characters and giving them all a lot more detail. When I launched into Nano, my character's (which my RPG session creation habit keeps wanting me to call "PC's") were little more than thumbnail sketches. Names with a couple ideas attached.
 
I realized this week, as I finished the beginning of my novel, that I was uncertain how to proceed (even with my sketchy outline) because I didn't really know who the characters were. I had put them into situations, including the novel's "inciting incident", but I wasn't as sure of their reactions as I should be. Because it's hard to know how a thumbnail should react.
 
So me and my character's are spending some quality time together.
 
After that, which might be tomorrow, or might be Sunday, I'm going to see about getting the story itself better defined. I have an outline, yes, but like the character's, it's a bit sketchy. I'm going to expand the outline and see if I can't come up with some useful chapter breaks.
 
Finally, though somewhat concurrent with all of the above, I'm moving this novel project into StoryBox, by fellow indie software developer and writer Mark Fassett. Mark's been adding features to StoryBox that sound both interesting and useful. I've avoided most specialized writing software up to now because how that software expected me to work and how I worked were seldom compatible. StoryBox, though, might be exactly what I was looking for. And, if not, I know Mark, and can badger him about making it more so.
 
-David