Mira is a NanoWrimo 2008 Winner!!
*Pats self on back*
I swear, I can barely remember what happened throughout the month of November. I spent so much of my time on my novel, I almost don't know what to do with myself now!
But first, the stats:
Mira's Final Wordcount = 52,036
Reached on = November 29th
Novel Complete? = No way HAHA! It'll probably need another 100k words to complete the plot arc that I had planned.
I can't believe I finished a day early! I was behind for most of the month, but come the end, I managed to do pretty good! I only got to my 52k words on the 29th thanks to the fact that I spent something like 6 hours on my novel. Maybe more. All I remember was waking up and going "Today, I finish this thing". Then I think it got dark, and my back went out when I tried to sit up again. Then we ordered pizza in glorious celebration and I laid on the couch with my ice pack on my back and watched Old Chicago. Then I went to sleep and woke up at 1pm.
Yes, Nano killed my sleeping habits. Yesterday I literally woke up at 2:43pm. In the afternoon. Not the morning. I didn't go to sleep until like... 6am. But I got up today at 9:30, so hopefully that will fix things all better for Mira.
But man. Wow. What a ride. I can't believe I managed to finish the challenge! Although I feel a little bad that I don't have an actual WHOLE NOVEL to be proud of. I've never been good at limiting my writing. But I did learn one important lesson, which is TURN OFF YOUR INNER CRITIC!
That has been my biggest challenge over the years. I've wanted to be an author since I was a little kid. (I wish I could find that picture of me on the old type writer my parents had), and I always stop after I read over my work and go "Dear god, what shite!"
I literally haven't read my own novel. I only allowed myself to read back one paragraph before I started my writing for the day. I'm a bit afraid to read it, actually since I still want to finish it and I know how bad my inner critic is. There's probably only about 10k of writing in all that that I'll end up wanting to keep.
But here I am babbling. I know everyone wanted to have a short synopsis and hear another excerpt so here goes...
Realea Weston (My Main Character, still looking for a good first name!) is a changeling child, although she doesn't know it. In her cradle as a baby, her parents found a curious book that could not be translated.
When her human parents become too poor to feed her and her mother takes ill, she is moved to the city where she is taken in by an eccentric old scribe known as Maimun, also a changeling although he was raised by forest trolls. There she meets a young boy named Baiden, also known as Wraith who is a Shroudfoot, or in other words, has the ability to blend with shadows without meaning to. He's also a very good thief. His actual background is a mystery.
After she learns how to read, Rea receives the book as a gift for her 18th birthday, after which Maimun goes to "become one with the forest" eg, die, and she is left to earn her bread as a scribe in the Lord's Keep as an assistant scribe, although she spends most of her time trying to figure out how to translate the text.
Long story short, the book which she thought originally was one of Fae Tales turns out to be a text of Faery history written in song format, as all Faery history is told. Translating the book will eventually reveal who her faery parents actually are and send her on an adventure to resurrect the old gods.
...
But I haven't gotten that far yet. xd
Okay, and as promised, here is one of my favorite excerpts! Note that I was getting seriously crazy at that point and my mental thesaurus was working overtime. But man, it was fun to write!
A little explanation on the excerpt: The Divine Institute of Abstruse Arcana and Scholastic Inquiry is a school of magic whose name is enchanted to force anyone speaking of it to say the entire name without omitting a single word. *Cough* It also was a good way to get some extra words in my manuscript, haha!
“Darn it!” Rea laughed. “Hey, do you think that maybe they could teach you how to control your magic there?”
“There where?” Baiden prompted, tears of laughter squeezing themselves out of his eyes.
“Why, at the Divine Institute of Abstruse Arcana and Scholastic Inquiry of course!”
“Oh of course! Well, they probably could, but then I would have to go around saying ‘Divine Institute of Abstruse Arcana and Scholastic Inquiry’ all day, and I’d probably die of asphyxiation.”
“Oh, don’t joke! I’ll bet that actually does happen to some of the poor students there. Probably in their first week or something.”
She didn’t know it of course, but the youngster was actually quite right on that subject.
Plenty of promising young Witches and Wizards had in actuality succumbed to the incredibly long designation of their alma mater. The truth of the matter was that the Divine Institute of Abstruse Arcana and Scholastic Inquiry had been trying for years to solve the little problem of their title. Although the public was made to believe that it was simply a clever marketing ploy, it was in fact, a curse that even their most renown professors and highly lauded graduates had yet to discover the knack of, a furtive little secret kept in the greatest of confidence by those privy to it. It is quietly rumored among the higher ups that a great wise savior will one day come to give them a new name and free the land from the insidious enchantment, while others believe that to do so would in actual fact, be the death of a great tradition of verbosity long upheld by wizards of every proclivity.
