Novel Month 2016 – Day 9, too early

To quote Professor Farnsworth: “I don’t want to live on this planet anymore!” Luckily, I have others to escape to.

Nocturne Chapter 7 is, at long last, complete. It’s a comparative monster, weighing in at just over 6,200 words. That’s almost double the size of its next biggest neighbor. (Put it in Otherworld, on the other hand, and it’s one of the shortest.)

I don’t know if I’ll write more tonight. I do know that I will later in the day, after I wake back up. I’ll adjust the daily average as needed. (I’m counting it as 8.5 days right now.)

Previous word count: 25,079
This session’s word count: 1,694
Total word count: 26,773
Daily average: 3,150

Novel Month 2016 – Day 8, early evening

I really would prefer to be in the world of Nocturne rather than the real one right now, but you know how that is. I’m still in Chapter 7, and I might be able to finish it after this whole Election Day thing ends. But that’ll be after midnight, which would make it tomorrow.

Daily average takes a big hit today, another thing we can blame Washington for. On the plus side, I’m now halfway done with the 50K goal. Halfway. On the 8th. I can’t believe it, either.

Previous word count: 23,780
This session’s word count: 1,299
Total word count: 25,079
Daily average: 3,135

Novel Month 2016 – Day 7, evening

Not a full chapter this time. Chapter 7 switches back to the Kellis POV for more sleuthing. It’s running parallel with the Nocturne timeline, which makes my head hurt, but there’s a lot of travel. That lets me fudge the numbers a bit. It helps. Anyway, our detective is on her way to hunt down the Nocturne (spoiler alert: she ain’t gonna find him yet), and that’ll take a while. In other words, long chapter, multiple days.

Tomorrow, of course, is The End of the World As We Know It, so I may not be writing quite as much as I’d like. My mom’s talking about some sort of Election Day party (our “game night” yesterday didn’t go too well), so…we’ll see.

Previous word count: 20,562
This session’s word count: 3,218
Total word count: 23,780
Daily average: 3,397

Novel Month 2016 – Day 6, late afternoon

Wrapping up a little earlier today, as I said yesterday. Still, I finished Chapter 6, even though that chapter may be a bit shorter than I’d like. It’s a “bridge” thing. Its whole purpose is to end the “introduction” phase of the story and begin working towards the climax. That’s a ways away, but it never hurts to start moving in the right direction.

Previous word count: 18,103
This session’s word count: 2,459
Total word count: 20,562
Daily average: 3,427

Novel Month 2016 – Day 5, evening

And there’s another chapter done. Kellis isn’t quite as hard to write as I first imagined. No real action, and a lot of today’s work was recapping from a different POV, but it was still a very good day.

Tomorrow might be less so, however. I’ve got a family get-together tomorrow evening, so that may cut off my writing time just a bit at the end. And I’m not exactly sure where the Nocturne goes from here. I’ll be thinking about it tonight and tomorrow morning.

Funny how I wrote over 3400 words, and my daily average went down. Never thought that would happen.

Previous word count: 14,669
This session’s word count: 3,444
Total word count: 18,103
Daily average: 3,621

Novel Month 2016 – Day 4, evening

Another day, another chapter. Ho-hum. To be fair, Nocturne‘s chapters are shaping up to be shorter than my usual average of 4,500 words. (And forget about Otherworld‘s 7,000+ words per chapter!) Maybe that’s from the 1st-person POV, or from the nonstop action. Both of those are coming to an end soon, so we’ll see. Next up is Chapter 5, which will introduce the secondary point of view, Kellis. Her story will be told in the third person, unlike the title character. And she’ll bring in more worldbuilding and plot development, a sure way to make my writing grind to a halt. Fun times ahead, as always.

Previous word count: 10,945
This session’s word count: 3,724
Total word count: 14,669
Daily average: 3,667

Novel Month 2016 – Day 3, evening

Today was a very good day for writing. It could be even better, maybe, but I think I’m done. My word count since I started at about noon stands at 4,785, which is more than I’ve ever written in a single day before. Counting this post, editing, notes, etc., it’s well over 5,000.

Storywise, I’m done with Chapters 2 and 3. Our hero (antihero?) has been in a bit of a scuffle, he’s ratted out a narc, and he’s getting ready to sneak into what’s essentially a police station. That’s not where I imagined this story would go when I first came up with it. But that’s how it is sometimes. That’s both the best and worst thing about the “organic” storytelling style I have: you never know where it will take you.

Previous word count: 6,160
This session’s word count: 4,785 (new record!)
Total word count: 10,945
Daily average: 3,648

Novel Month 2016 – Day 2, evening

A fruitful day today. I seem to be recovering from whatever sinus malady has been afflicting me the last few days. The dizzy spells are becoming fewer and farther between, so that’s good. And Nocturne is coming along nicely. I got most of Chapter 2 done today. It’s still in the expository phase right now, but I’m closing in on the main plot hook.

Previous word count: 2,650
This session’s word count: 3,510
Total word count: 6,160
Daily average: 3,080

Novel Month 2016 – Day 1, early evening

And so it begins.

Nocturne is a bit different from last year’s Otherworld #2 (now called “The City and the Hill”). It’s going to be a mixed 1st and 3rd person, with the 1st person stuff told as kind of a flashback sequence. It’s also shaping up to be a bit dark, probably darker than even I like. We’ll have to see where the story takes us, as I don’t have a lot of plans for it yet—another way this year is different.

Today, I wrote up the Prologue, which is a 3rd-person intro to the story proper, and the very short Chapter 1, told from the title character’s POV as if it was in his voice. With any luck, the meat of the story starts tomorrow.

This session’s word count: 2,650
Total word count: 2,650

Classifying writing

So we’re getting close to another November, and that means it’s time to get to some serious writing business. Tomorrow, I’ll start, and I hope to reach the magic 50,000 mark once again. This time around, I’ll give a lot more story detail in my daily updates, along with the running word counts.

The novel I’m writing this year has the working title Nocturne, and it’s my first real attempt at book-length fantasy of the “traditional” style. It’ll have magic and mystery and all that stuff. And unlike my Linear Anthology series, it’ll be a “full-length” novel.

But what does that even mean? What’s the difference between a novel and a novella? And where do short stories fit in? Sure, there is significant overlap, and you can say it’s really a continuum; you can have short novels and long novellas. But for an objective metric, a first approximation, we can use the same measurement that every NaNoWriMo participant will be looking at come tomorrow: word count.

Taking the length of one of my works, I divide it into one of three categories: novel, novella, or short story. The numbers I use are pretty simple, and they’re loosely based on the NaNoWriMo “50,000 words” milestone.

  • A novel, for me, is a work that is at least 50,000 words. Preferably, I want it to be 60,000+, but that’s for a very specific reason: I consider my Otherworld series (I’ll start posting those to supporters in the coming months) to be made up of novellas, but some of them run as high as 59,000 words. This is where the stylistic argument comes in. Oh, and there’s no real upper limit, either. The longest work I’ve written weighs in at about 250K, and it’s still a novel. A ponderous tome indeed, but a novel all the same.

  • A novella is shorter, no more than 50-60K. It has to be a minimum of 15,000, though 20,000 is better. (The mathematically inclined reader will notice a pattern here.) By the 20K standard, I don’t actually have any novellas written yet, but I’ll remedy that soon enough.

  • Finally, I consider a short story to be anything under the minimum for a novella. Thus, it can range up to 20,000 words, though anything over 15K is pushing it. (If you prefer a category of “novelette”, then you can slot it in here as 5-15K or 6-20K, with short stories being even shorter than that.) My short stories, however, often have a lot more plot and worldbuilding than you’d expect from something with that name.

So, to sum up, it looks like this:

Type Length (5) Length (6)
Short story < 15,000 < 20,000
Novelette* 5,000-15,000 6,000-20,000
Novella 15,000-50,000 20,000-60,000
Novel > 50,000 > 60,000

Pick which progression you want to follow, and there you go. If you like the novelette category, use its minimum as the maximum for short stories. And don’t neglect the style differences between the different types of work. They’re what led me to make two different classifications in the first place. Novels have more subplots, for example, and I want a novella to be long enough that it has the depth to hook me, but not so long that I can’t read it in one sitting.

Now, it’s onward to November. Can I do this for the fifth straight year? Stay tuned!