Less than half-way through this and I'm starting to go stir-crazy.
***
Considerably less than half-way through the novel. I'm at 10K right now with a typical productive day of 1,000 words. I would like to do better than that.
I still feel there are too many characters, and there's too many of the concepts being thrown at the reader in the first chapters. But that's not the worst. It feels too tense, moving too abruptly from one thing to another.
I messed around with one of the scenes and put several hundred more words into it just having my protagonist take a breath and think about what she'd just learned. That's a good direction to take. But I'll wait until I see more of the thing in context.
And the dialect stuff is getting really dialed down. With one glaring exception. I absolutely have to put in some dialectic quirks because, again, I have too many characters. There's two stereotypes of the Geordie speech pattern, for instance; using "like" as a sort of punctuation, and using "man" frequently. Which, unfortunately, can as easily come across as a Surfer Dude accent.
Still, that's the sort of thing I could be doing to make the voices more distinct. I'm drowning in attributions already and they are not enough by themselves. Nor can I really sell it by having different people have specific intents or knowledge bases, as none of that is clear enough to the reader yet as to allow them to sort people out by the nuances of what they are saying.
Well, I'm also stopped for the night because I'm loosely outlined. The outline for the next scene say, "Graham and Penny talk to some Detectorists."
Not a word in the outline about how he gets in contact with her, or what he tells her to get her to come along, or what he is hoping to achieve, or who these people are. The sort of thing, that is, that I'd normally be thinking about while at work (or at least in the walk down to work.)
NaNoWriMo approaches really work better when you've got a tight outline.
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