All right, I'm rather late with this post; week four of NaNoWriMo ended almost 24 hours ago. A variety of factors conspired against my making this post earlier, however, including a job interview and a gastrointestinal disorder. In any case, though, despite some factors that impinged on my time and prevented me from making this post in a timely manner, week four of NaNoWriMo actually went pretty well.
In particular, for the first time since the beginning of Week Two, I actually got back on track to finish 100,000 words by the end of the month. Oh, the middle days of the week were unspectacular. I had a good start, with 5,444 words on Monday, but then Tuesday I added only 2,432 words, and Wednesday, with 661 words, was even worse. I was afraid the next few days might be difficult, with Thanksgiving weekend coming; family was visiting from out of town, and I wasn't sure how much time I'd find for my writing. But as it happened, Thursday I started picking up the pace again and got to 3,107 words, and then Friday I broke 5,000 words, Saturday I had my second best day ever with 6,552, and yesterday I did slightly worse, with 5,479, but still enough to at last put me back where I should be. (To reach 100,000 words by the end of the month, I should have been at at least 93,333 words by that day; I was at 95,154.)
Now, mind you, it's still going to be a bit of a challenge finishing the novel, mainly because it's looking like the first draft may be somewhat more than 100,000 words... I'm near the end of the story, but I'm not sure I'm that near the end. But we'll see what the next two days bring...
In any case, another thing I've found interesting about the writing process of this novel is the way some minor characters unexpectedly took center stage. That's happened before in another novel I started a while back (and have yet to finish), The Demon of Cyrano Station, in which two members of the command crew of the titular space station, the security chief and the head of publicity, both of whom I expected to be minor background characters, somehow made their way into the spotlight and ended up becoming main characters. In the case of Ichor, the story I'm working on for NaNoWriMo, one of the spotlight-seizing characters has been the captain of the ship. Obviously, the ship had to have a captain; I always knew that character would be there, and I had planned out his appearance, at least. But he ended up becoming a much more important character than I imagined, perhaps having the most "screen time" of any character in the story aside from the protagonist. He also ended up being perhaps the most fun character to write, with the most distinctive speech patterns. (One thing I may work on in the rewrites is to make sure each character, or at least each important character, has more of his own voice, his own characteristic way of speaking, his own oratorical mannerisms. The captain, however, is the one character who in the rough draft already well found his own distinctive voice, and is all the more enjoyable to write for because of it.)
The other character who jumped into the spotlight was even more of a surprise, because I hadn't planned for her at all. In the first week of NaNoWriMo, when I was still, er, wasting some time on the NaNoWriMo forums, I mentioned in a post there that my main character's "sexuality never comes up in the story"—that is to say, the protagonist had no love interest in the story, or anyone he even showed particular interest in. Well, as I was writing Chapter 10, though, a love interest sort of naturally developed, and I saw some good possibilities it could bring to the story, so I went with it. Since I hadn't originally planned on any such thing, though, I hadn't designed a character to fill that role, so I pretty much just picked a name from a list of crewmen who had been mentioned before but I hadn't done anything with. This character who came into the story pretty much on the fly then ended up playing a very significant role, and likewise accumulating a lot of "screen time" (though not as much as the captain). Of course, one thing I'll have to do in the rewrites is maybe give her a couple of notable appearances earlier so she doesn't seem to come out of nowhere in Chapter 10, but still, the way she developed was completely unexpected.
So. Anyway. I'm on the home stretch. I've finally reached the point that, in terms of the screenwriters' "three act structure", I'd call Act Three. (I'm not really a big exponent of the "three act structure", in fact I think it's badly overemphasized and often inapplicable, but in this particular case I think Ichor does have a well-defined Act Three, though the line between Act One and Act Two is much fuzzier.) Here's where it all comes together, where all the guns on the mantel get fired, and where things really go off the rails. Now I just need to get it all down in the next two days...
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