I’m a NaNo Winner!

Every book is different, as I’ve said, but this year’s National Novel Writing Month book was more different than usual. It came out right on the mark for Nano – 50,000 words – which is very short for a Sword and Sorcery Fantasy. I fully expect it to double or more in revision, but have decided to leave it alone until I have the final book(s) of the series done because I expect the final book to cause some substantial changes.

What makes it unique, besides the odd Point of View that it shares with the rest of the set, is the extremely high percentage of narrative, and the reasons behind it.

Most of the time when you have more narrative than dialogue, it means that you are doing too much telling and not enough showing. Although that is the case in a few places in this book, it is not true for most of it. That is because most of the book is intended to be an argument between the narrator and the character in the book to whom the book was written.

I mentioned odd point of view, right? I think it’s technically second person narrative, except that second person is generally directed at an undefined reader. This is aimed straight at a character that appeared trivial and enigmatic in the first two books.

In the first book the person to whom the book was written is hidden until the end. In the second, it’s up front, but largely unimportant. In this one it’s up front and vital. This one reveals many twists and divergences from the material in the first two. It looks like a string of vignettes, but it’s all calculated to bring to bear a vital, and hopefully unexpected point at the very end.

It went together fairly quickly, except on Wednesdays when I wrote Suzie’s House. Working on Suzie’s House threw me out of the story completely. It typically took a day or two for me to get back into it.

I was close enough by the end of last week to make it worth pushing to finish early. It’s the first Thanksgiving in many years where NaNo wasn’t hanging over my head the whole time. I found it a refreshing change.