I always do a little extra nano challenge – this is GothNoWriMo which is a challenge to write gothic lit in a month. I stretched the meaning of Goth slightly and went with alternative instead. Because I tend to write trilogies or books in 3 parts, I start new series within the Punk’s Universe every year in October.
Also it is a warm up for NaNoWriMo – I rarely meet my word targets for October but it gets me back into the practice of writing each day and the word counts increase over the month so that during November and Nano proper I do hit the word goals and sometimes exceed!
A drug epidemic is flashing through London, characterised by violence and necrosis. A young police officer and her team end up enlisted in a military effort to stamp out production but what the army don’t know is that the drug is not new. It is ancient and at the heart of a battle that predates human civilisation, a war for power. There is more at steak than anyone can possibly imaging, will they be able to help stop the destruction as the UK slips further and further into chaos and ruin.
The Blue Lotus will be the novel I’ll be working on in October for GothNoWriMo which is a kind of unofficial spin off of NaNoWriMo but has a thing where you decided on your own goal between 30-70, 000 words for the month.
The Blue Lotus is the forth in the Zombie Quintette series of The Punk’s Universe. The ground work for the story was laid down during the writing of the Godex trilogy where the drug and the cult of the same name both appear. And with that in mind I have decided to just steal one of the Godex’s main characters – the female police officer who is actually secretly working for an ancient secret group who look alot like our idea of aliens…
Having said that I completely can’t remember her name or anything nor a lot of the plot for Godex and I know that it is not actually a finished story yet but when have I ever let such minor details get in my way!
So I think this means I might have to a) find, b) read, c) analyse The Godex.
This is the planning notebook and within it are plans!
I started by thinking about which of the many story ideas I should run with – I knew the story would be Punk Universe based as my nano projects always are! But I wasn’t sure what within that universe it would be.
Having suffered a head injury last year it has been a challenge to remember exactly what is going on within the world/universe I have built but fortunately I have lots and lots of notes and snippets of stories written not to mention diagrams and my poor family and friends who know all about the project in painful detail!
So armed with all of that I looked at what I managed to do last year and what I did for camp-nano in summer and have decided to go with finishing off my Zombie Quintette.
I’ve been working on this series for a couple of years now – the idea was to try and include as many types of zombies as would fit – of course there is no actual magic in the Punk’s Universe it is Science Fiction/Fantasy where it may appear to have magic but it all comes down to high tech in some form or another.
This means the zombie vectors for the last two books are a narcotic called Blue Lotus and Meat Puppets or implant mind control which manifests similar to voodoo.
And with that decision made there is a lot more planning to do!
It is September and that is the month I attempt to plan my nano in these days – this is mainly because I do a kind of double writing challenge.
They started off as separate things but as I have progressed with writing the Punk’s Universe using the writing challenges it has become something a little different. I am often writing sets of stories so I will start say one of a trilogy in October and then then the second book in November for actual NaNoWriMo.
Also though I started the Punk’s Universe as a seat of your pants project ie I was just writing as I went with no planning – that is no longer possible as there are so so many interconnected stories.
So September is planning month!
I am doing most of the planning using paper and pen – this is mainly due to having lots of funky notebooks and fitting the planning in during odd moments when I am out waiting for kids at clubs etc… This year I have a lovely notebook all the way from South Africa 🙂
My plan is to spend half an hour on this everyday at least 😀
We are just over half way through this months writing challenge and I am not doing as well as I would like. I have written 8000 words so far, scattered across two novels and a flash fiction. I am hoping to break the 10 K barrier today though obviously I have side tracked myself into writing blog posts!
Hoping to get to a second write in this weekend as I always write more at those. Also big spur is that my Camp Nano survival kit has arrived complete with cloth badge! (Yes I have a camp blanket and guess what is going on there!).
At the moment it looks rather doubtful that I can complete the challenge but you never know!
Looking at the volume of the first Punk novels I am starting to think I need to split them out – they were written with chapters alternatively in the past and future. I really like this style of chapters which I first came across as a teen reading The Eight, but the book lengths are getting stupid.
I had interwoven the plots but think they could would as distinct books – however the other reason I did it was to try and make it clear that there was a science fiction element there and the huge stretches of time – think Highlander.
Also I really enjoyed writing it as it was like working on two separate stories but the other trilogies set in the World do not follow this pattern – what to do?
For now I will just keep writing but would be interested in opinions.
The stories set in the Punk’s World/Universe are so epic now that I have had to cave in and pint it out. I thought I’d share with you the first 100, 000 words of The Punk In Pink. I will be organising it all with the help of arch-lever files and sticky tabs in various colours 🙂
So it is just gone midnight and now is the time to begin – so of course I decided that writing a blog post about the fact I am not yet writing would be the thing to do!
I’ve decided to kind of mix it all up so for instance I will spend tonight writing out the wholes in The Punk in Pink – the half Elizabethan and half futuristic story where Punku (The Punk) starts to discover who she is after centuries of amnesia.
I will do at least 2000 words on this project but once that 2000 is up I am allowed to change – I may then write some flash fiction or work on the Godex series or Prometheus etc… Each day I will select one to work on like this.
It probably isn’t the most sensible way but then none of this has ever been done sensibly and this year is the 5 yr of nanoing 🙂 Six if you count the non Punk based story series I started but never even got around to registering in 2008 when I first found out about nano 🙂
So see you all on the flip side of the writing 😀
