Mutiny!

Yes, I have a full-blown character mutiny here tonight.

I got no writing done last night due to pressures from the day job taking my first world issues by the horns and wandering off on their own to do work like things. My plan to hit 35k was dead in the water, as was a plan to drink some beer for company, which was sad. Instead I watched the daily target hit 31,667 whilst I was still at 30,400. Tonight, the plan was to get William through an attack viewed at a distance to more boredom behind lines where we could find out what each of the characters wants to do when the war is over - here we'd learn that William has no idea and quite likes the war itself for being, well, something to do - and then an actual harrowing experience after which he will have an awkward moment or two with a local girl.

No. Instead the whole of the 15th battalion mutinied on me and joined battle with the enemy in the village. William has killed a man, his first directly, and has now taken part in a genuine hand-to-hand struggle with bayonets. Damn him. Damn the 15th. Just stay put out of range you damnable contemptible buggers!  This is a character novel, not a war novel!

I can't complain. I've hit 35,200.

We're at war

Yep, they've had a battle.  William Caston has annoyed his peers and won a medal for bravery by getting them all in danger and putting his men in the firing line. However, it was early days in the war and so he managed to do it without firing a shot and without taking a casualty.

Of course, the battle itself had to end another way and so we have the 'Slaughter of Innocents' which is not a rip off of the Kindermord von Ypren at all, nooo, as if I would steal the basic narrative of the war from the First World War.  Ahem.  I'm about to rip off the battle of Neuve Chapel, well hidden as the battle of Neeuwekerque (see what I did there?) as well.

I think the novel is changing - we have a war novel now. I hope I can get through the whole thing before the month is up, I don't really want to write a war novel because I don't know enough to make it authentic. Still, I do hope to have my MC have a dalliance with a nice young Aixlenean lady and face tanks, did I mention tanks? I think I did. Then he can go home and start his politicisation.

On the plus side, despite writing war, I have yet to be surprised by any horrible stuff that William has done or had to write any scenes involving harrowing death and destruction. I suppose the latter will come later.

My novel is, like, really despressing.

We're in the army now

I've got to the war. And my novel has changed already. Just written the longest contiguous bit of prose in it so far, at just shy of 2k words, and the character of it is definitely different. I'm at that horrible point where I know I need to do some things but I want to get to the next bit of action instead. However, in order to make the action make sense I first need to lay the groundwork for it, or the action will make little sense and I know that I won't go and do that any time soon if I skip it.

In other news, William has survived the first, long range, contact with the enemy and now has a small section. I am in danger of using the bit from "Eyes Open" that resides on this blog at some point, but that will have to be changed quite a lot in order to make any sense in the context of William's life. Am I now sounding like an autistic man?  I think that perhaps I am.  I blame William.

It always gets to me that the war as depicted in Hitler: the Rise of Evil and the war I know from other sources, like Lyn MacDonald, John Keegan et al are two different things. Furthermore, the way that the First World War works in Hitler flies in the face of the way it works in the adaptations of All Quiet on the Western Front too, suggesting that the German experience of it was very different to what we see in the former. I get the impression that the people that made Hitler were not really focused on the war. Being a student of it myself, and borrowing from it rather liberally for the setting for William's rise to dictator, I think I may end up over-doing it.

Still, after I have the 50,000 I can edit it later, right?

On the other hand, I am now back on track at 26,900 words at the time of writing. I may do some more tonight, but I'm having a beer and feeling tired, so I'm not banking on it.

Back on the sauce

Better night writing tonight, achieved by cheating and being too dog-tired to do anything connected to the day job. After the day I've had there I would usually just have a night vegetating in front of the telly, so it was nice to have Nano force me to do something more productive.

So, tonight I cheated by skipping past the part where my MC changes to become a little more, well, minimal and went straight to the Aixlenean war, allowing me to put in some tired training camp tropes and some scenes I remember from the 1930s adaptation of All Quiet on the Western Front and Hitler: the Rise of Evil where the company gets shelled arriving at the front - though I didn't quite get that far. I also added a character name that I've had before but found him to be a lot different than the other times I've deployed him.

Anyway, headlines: just shy of 24,000 words and no music tonight.  Much experimentation, if it can be called that, with dialogue driven scenes that have minimal descriptive elements. Not sure of if they work but so going to keep trying.

Ouch

1,466 words, and they were hard.

Day job has drained me.  And I took a night off it.  So there's more to do in the week on the evenings, when I would write.  I needed 5k tonight.  Or more.

Jeremy and William are split up.  Aixlene has had a revolution.  War is coming.  I write in short sentences.

Total is just over 20k.

Evil?

So, tonight, I have found myself writing a kissing scene and a rescue from a burning building with a playlist that rattled between Angel by Massive Attack and Fire by the Crazy World of Arthur Brown.  I have also found myself deciding that my main character is not a person I would particularly like to meet in real life.  I fear he holds up a mirror to humanity that I do not find terribly flattering but, at the same time, I worry that his mirror is more accurate than I would like.

Basically, well, after that conversation I wrote last I began to wonder about him.  I already knew that he was going to rescue his love interest from a burning building and that his own ineptitude in romantic affairs coupled with the near death experience of his paramour would lead them to cheat on him.  I knew that.  I also knew that, in order to make the relationship believeable, there would need to be something physical beyond hands around shoulders and hints in dialogue.  What I was most certainly not prepared for was what happened.

The kissing scene held a predatory passion that I did not know the character possessed and the fire rescue carried the discovery, and the deliberate leaving for dead, of a young girl trapped in a room.  The latter one leaves me with the most qualms.  I don't like it very much, though William was perfectly happy to ignore it afterwards, and even though I wrote it... well, it doesn't feel very much like me.  I think I'm channelling Billy-boy, and it's not an experience I relish!

On a happier note, the plague has passed the household, the children are sleeping better and so I have time to write again.  Hurrah.  3,468 words today and a pizza.  That's worth celebrating.

Playlists, plague and racism

Well, I had to take a day off to see bonfires and then another to keep pace with the day job deluge of drudgery and devilment.  With sickness in the house and multiple vomitings upon my person by other people I was slowly losing the belief that I could carry on.

And tonight has been rather difficult.  There was a long section that relied almost entirely on third person summary, which is not a good way to advance plot, I was so much more into the whole vignette idea to show time passing and also to impart relevant information without 'telling' - one of my worst habits back when I used to write more.

Having an autistic main character has, however, worked wonders.  Now my soulless and technical style is for a reason and helps to characterise William as he slowly develops into the person he becomes by the end of the novel.  This is, unfortunately, going to mean some conversations like the one I wrote this evening - hugely racist with the characters having the discussion not even having the awareness to register the horrors which they bandy about.  Partly I'm glad, the Dandies are supposed to be dangerous and, well, just a little bit seedy but mostly I'm appalled that I could even write it.

William Caston, you are not a terribly nice person you know!

He knows, he's fine with it, being nice is a sign of weakness if it is not used for personal gain.  Everyone is doing it, apparently.

Well, quite.  Thank you William.  And now shut up, the adults are talking.  Oh, I'm back in the swing, but much reduced on daily wordcount: 15,696.