To the Sixes

I'll be alternating between two projects this month, finishing Chapters 3 + 4 of Full Metal Bitch and putting 50,000 words into Her Smoke Rises Up Forever.

You can follow my daily word in NaNoWriMo count on this linked page.

I'm up to 13,141 words in my NaNoWriMo fanfic novel, Praise Be to Nero's Neptune. Progress has been slowly picking up after the initial "creative frenzy" that follows me starting any project. I had a couple of ideas of what I wanted to do -- Lu Ten and King Kuei as fellow gilded cage birdies, Fire Lord Iroh's cultural imperialism, Toph's very different life, the new, evil Blue Spirit -- but it didn't really gel into an actual story until around the time I hit the 10k mark. Then I realized what Praise Be is really about: crack shipping. Yes, aside from some background Kataang, there will be crack ships galore: Foe Yay-tastic Blukka (Blue Spirit/Sokka), unsubtle Ku Tei (Lu Ten/Kuei), bittersweet Lu Yuen (Lu Ten/Yue), "doin' it for Mad Scienzzz" Liankka (Sokka/Lian), chaste Soaang (Song/Aang), and, heck, I'm even thinking about throwing in some Maizukla (Mai/Zuko/Azula) just for the hell of it. I'm sure sanity will prevail about including that last ship, however.

Here's an excerpt, below the cut.

It's almost November, which means National Novel Writer's Month is about to begin.

Now, originally, I was planning on have you guys -- my loyal (or intermittent) blog readers -- pick the 50,000 fanfic I was going to write out of three options. Alas, Facing Fearful Odds still isn't done, so I can't take November off.

But here's what I'm going to do in November. I am going to finish Facing Fearful Odds: Book 1... and then, however many words I have left out of that 50,000, I'm going to start writing Book 2 and KEEP WRITING until I do 50,000 words total for FFO in November.

Yes, yes. I know this isn't quite in the spirit of NaNoWriMo, but it's what I'm doing it, so screw the rules. I'm going to write 50,000 words worth of prose for Facing Fearful Odds in November. I'm going to finish Book 1, because it has less than fifty thousand words left in it, and then I'm going to start Book 2.

This does NOT mean I am abandoning Taking Sights. After I've hit my 50,000 word goal and the final chapters of FFO are away at the beta, I fully intend to begin writing the final ten chapters of Taking Sights.  I've said several times on this blog that I would finish Taking Sights after I had FFO: Book 1 done... and I'm still saying that. Once Taking Sights is done, I'll be going back to work on FFO: Book 2, carrying on from whatever chapter/point I'm at whichI finally hit that 50,000 word goal for NaNoWriMo.

So here's what I'm going to be doing. Tomorrow, on November 1st, I'll be making a new sticky post at the top of this blog. It will track my word count for NaNoWriMo. I will be updating it each day, be it that I write ten thousand words in one sitting or zero for a whole day. Any words of encouragement, threats, or random NaNoWriMo-related queries can be put there.


Tomorrow is November 1st. The end of Facing Fearful Odds: Book 1 is at hand...