Total words written for Nanowrimo this year: 10115.
Well I suppose that is “a failure”. Shit got in the way, especially that little voice in the back of my head that made me buy an Xbox. But on the other hand, that roughly-10k words involved digging through all my old notes on the story, putting them together in one place, getting two chapters to usable first draft script stage, realizing what the real relationship between the main character and another one is, and writing a bunch of dialogue snippets involving yet another character who’d been hanging around saying “I belong in this story” without me quite knowing how they fit – now the Jet Grind Sigilizer has more specific things to do than run into Alecto in the non-existant subways of New Orleans.
And given that my main goal was “actually fucking poke at Drowning City”, I think I am pretty happy with what I achieved. I was hoping to write about 30k words and have a completed rough draft of the whole saga, but I kinda got hung up on thinking of Unpleasant Tests to run on Alecto when she’s in the hands of human scientists, and drifted away. The whole thing is a little more defined than it was in October, a little closer to being something I can actually start drawing; really, if I wanted to start drawing it and working things out along the way, it’s probably only a few days of poking at the outline away from being ready for that – but I want to experiment with having the whole damn script written first, and taking it through a second, even third, draft, because there’s a kind of inevitableness to the whole story that needs to be there, and that I think can only be there if I’ve got a lot of carefully-planned foreshadowing woven throughout it.
Currently it looks like it’ll be 12 chapters of about 14 pages each, for around 170 pages of comics. Plus a few more pages for chapter titles and whatnot. It also still wants to be in pre-internet “standard” comics sizes, so that’ll be a fair amount of stuff. It’ll probably end up getting a little longer as the script comes into focus when I pick it up again. (Which I just did, in a tiny way – I think I added about 400 words here and there while looking over it, contemplating what has changed in this story since the beginning of November. Maybe I’ll fiddle with it some more over the next few days now than I remember I have it.)