Sequel 2

Blogspot got me again with the New Blog button. It wanted me to create a different blog. No!

If you haven't heard of NaNoWriMo, it stands for National Novel Writing Month. It's in November. People write a 50,000 word "novel" in a month. I've never done it, because it didn't fit what I was doing at the time. I wasn't going to stop Messengers to do a 50k book. I was thinking I might try it this year. Why? Because I got about 60k words done on the Messengers sequel in less than a month. I'm over 85% of the way toward the target word count of 80k words now, although it's slowed down quite a lot due to various things like dental problems, sleep problems and structure angst. Sci-Fi and fantasy novels run 80k to 120k words depending. I'd call 40k words a novella. That's why I put quotes around novel up above. Is 50k really a novel? Ask a publisher. ;)

Structure angst. When I was doing Messengers, I wrote the kind of book I wanted to read. I ignored a lot of rules like: not adding important characters at the end, putting in scenes that added atmosphere but didn't necessarily advance the plot, telling instead of showing, etc. If I came to something cool that I wished someone else would've done at least once if it wasn't against "the rules," I went ahead and did it if I thought it worked! If I'd followed the rules, everyone would've been healed at the end of book 4. Joe and Ceinwen would marry at the end of book 4. The rain would have been at the end of book 4. Etc.
Anyway, from here on out I'm paying more attention to the rules, especially structure. Novels have a certain structure to follow. The sequel may not exactly follow the structure. So, I'm having some angst about what to do about it. I guess I'm going to finish it up and then go back and see how it looks. It makes me tired thinking about it.
I have two main storylines. Marion and Etan are the main characters most of the time, and they're doing their own things. That reminds me. In the last blog I was talking about the prologue being long. Forget it. There was a lot more story there than I thought. The prologue turned into book 1. But. There's still going to have to be a division between this book and the next one because there's a time gap between the things that happen in this book and the beginning of the war. This book(which doesn't have a title right now) happens the same year that Messengers ended. The next book takes place about three years later based on everything going on now. So, back to the storylines. I have to make sure they follow the correct structure and that things are timed properly so it's not jarring to skip back and forth.

The mystery/romance. I haven't gotten back to it in any significant way. I think the structure is mostly okay. ;) I need to do a read through on it to see how it reads now and then fix anything that comes up. I already know I need to add a little in the ending chapters to make it flow better. I've been debating whether to take a break from the sequel to do that or keep going. So far I've kept going on the sequel.

I'm out of time. I'll let you know more later.