I’ve started rereading The Vern (not the real title) one of my NaNo projects from 2013, the year I went insane and racked up 130,000 words in 30 days. I’m looking at it for a couple of reasons:
- I need something else (other than Autocrit) to focus on while my queries for Dakotashi One are out there in agent-land (I don’t have anything at the right stage to start writing).
- If I go through all the agents who represent fantasy that I can find and none bite on Dakotashi, I’ll need something else to send them.
- The Vern fits some of the wish-list criteria I’ve seen: multicultural, non-European setting.
- It’s a cool story/setting/characters that I definitely wanted to get back to anyway at some point.
It’s a weird experience. It’s both better and worse than I thought. I don’t remember all that happens, so I’m enjoying the story and characters, but I also notice all these things that need to be worked on. Everything needs to be tightened, of course—NaNo right? But while so far I think the plot & characters are good, I’m narrating/telling way too much. The characters are on a journey so there a lot of jumping around (to avoid unending travel through rainforests where nothing happens), but the scenes are too short (because of the narration/telling) to really ground the reader before jumping again. So I’ll need to find ways to be more present in the moment and expand the scenes without focusing too much on mundane journey stuff that doesn’t really matter.
I also discovered that one of my main characters reminds me of Dakotashi in that she has a rich & violent backstory. I have been thinking recently about how while I love flashbacks on TV, I tend to dislike them when I’m reading. I made the decision not to use flashbacks for Dakotashi, despite his rich and relevant backstory, for this reason. However, I’m thinking now that maybe they’ll work in this story.
I’ve always wanted Dakotashi’s history to be somewhat mysterious and vague. His story affects his emotions more than anything else. For Amber, one of my main characters in The Vern, her story not only affects her emotions, but the plot and her relationships with other characters. Anyway, I am at least considering using flashbacks for her.
In the meantime, I will continue to think about how to show all these scenes better. The Vern is going to require a lot of work, but maybe not as much scene moving/combining/rewriting as Dakotashi One. Wish me luck!