Saturday, November 20, 2010

NaNo, day 20 - STORY COMPLETE!

Chapter one -> Twenty-five = complete, finished, DONE!

Time to get drawing!

Word Count: 46,874 /25,000 *
Story = 187% complete
Art = 1%

Got off to a bit of a slow start this morning - slogged out a few hundred words before heading off to the swamp to see what could be seen. Found some swans. Funny that to most folks the black swan is an oddity and weird, but for me to see a family of WHITE swans today was a truly beautiful and inspiring sight. They're VERY rare in NZ, and only really live around Lake Ellesmere. Also saw a pair of grebes. I love grebes, they're so angular and have awesome hair-styles.

Neither grebes nor swans appear in my story. Maybe I should remedy that.

After returning home and heading out again in search of lunch and to visit the library, I finally settled down to writing at around 3 pm. My mother rang just as I was getting into the swing of things and delayed things further.

But, now some few thousand words later I can say it.

The story is FINISHED!

So, I didnt' reach the 50k mark. I never actually intended to. The fact that I managed to do 46k rather impressed me - I didn't think I had that much story to tell. But once she was born, Aroha just took over.

But today's difficulty was the climax.

It had to be good, it had to be action packed, it had to have tension. After some rumination, I decided I needed to split Maru and Aroha up. Easily done - they needed to quarrel. Aroha's a stubborn hen anyhow and Maru's a bit on the sensible side. He called her "a pet" (and then possibly a "duck"). Then I had to make something bad happen that would get them both together.

And once I started, it worked quite well.

Anyhow, here's today's extract and now I am off for a celebratory chai.

This conversation is between the members of the (human) Stillwater "gang" who have just captured Maru (Aroha's not-boyfriend) and are planning on cooking up some WCFW (West Coast Fried Weka). Note: This is an overheard conversation (NOT seen), so I did not see the need to define who said what. She's a weka, males and females don't sound particularly different to her.

Chop off its head, see if it runs around.”

That's sick, man.”

Oh, don't be such a wimp. Haven't you ever killed a chook before? We used to time how long it took before the body realised it had no head and dropped. My record was one minute thirty seconds. Dumb birds. Don't even know when they're headless.”

Yeh, I've killed 'em. But we normally snap the neck. Much cleaner.”

Actually, there was a chicken what lived for two years.”

Oh yeh, right.”

Nah, it's true. They called him 'Mike', had him in a circus and everything. Had to be fed with a syringe. Choked to death in the end.”

That's gross.”

No, it's not. It's fowl.”

Oh shut up, Stephen.”

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