Nanowrimo Failure

In a kind of literary suicide pact with fellow Nanowrimoer Jodiferous, I have decided to throw in the towel to 2007's Nanowrimo challenge. The spirit was willing, but the imagination was weak.

I flunked. I failed. My Nanowrimo attempt ended like English ambitions in a football World Cup - an embarrassing disappointment.

I think the largest hurdle in my path to 50,000 words was a plan.

I am a stickler for plotting out each of my novels, chapter by chapter. This time around, I had been so wound up with a publishing project that I never even thought about what I intended to write until a few days before the kick off date.

I leapt headfirst into The God Squad - but in less than 10,000 words, the lack of planning led my team of intrepid monster hunters into a gloomy morgue and no off-the-cuff plotting promised to lead them back out again.

Good story. Good idea. It just needed a plot and planning.

So The God Squad lurked in the shadows and I moved onto Plan B.

By this stage, I'd already wasted 12 days of Nanowrimo, so I would have to double my word count to even approach completion. So in the absence of an original idea, I yanked Adventure Eddy out of vacation and threw him into a radio-based adventure I'd been musing about for a while.

One Saturday, I hammered out 10,000 words of that story... And hit a dead end.

It was a nice little story, but needed to be plotted and planned. Adventure Eddy came to a dead end sitting in a studio at WinFM during Mia Saxon's mid-morning show.

[Mia Saxon's back?? And she's a radio presenter?? - Editorial Bear.]

So we'd blown the half way point by now and things were looking grim. Despite having typed a total of 20,000 words in two unrelated stories, I was now left with a word count of zero.

I tried my hand at one last project - something I'd been musing about for a while.

Basically, it was a fictional autobiography of Auric Goldfinger - the bad guy in Ian Fleming's 1959 book Goldfinger.

As much as I love his books, Ian Fleming was a pompous ass - and worse than that, the first three Caucasian bad-guys he invented (Le Chiffre, Hugo Drax and Goldfinger) were all redheads!

Since the popularity of The Moneypenny Diaries (the so called 'real' diaries of Bond's secretary) I figured maybe it was time for a different perspective on Bond's most enduring nemesis. So I started a little story following Goldfinger's arrest and incarceration after his failed attempt to rob Fort Knox.

I claimed his 'death' was staged by the British government so they could interrogate him and reclaim the billions of pounds worth of gold bullion he'd smuggled out of Britain.

It was fun - but difficult. Fleming's incontrovertible 'facts' in Goldfinger made a reinvention of the character kind of difficult and once I'd dug into his back story - which featured an upbringing in war-torn Latvia and a stint spent in Korea - I realised I wouldn't be able to right this story without several history books and - you guessed it - some concrete planning regarding plot.

So my third effort came to naught as well.

A grand total of 20,124 words written - and none of it worth printing on anything other than toilet tissue.

So since I'd made three stabs at Nanowrimo, I figured Goldfinger's mantra was worth observing. To paraphrase - first time is Happenstance. Second is Coincidence. Third time is Enemy Action.

I'd observe the warnings and surrender my Nanowrimo ambitions.

So what's the next step?

Well, I need to get my head together and start thinking about what it is I want to write, what I hope to achieve with my writing and how best to accomplish that. If the least few years have taught me anything, it's that the ability to sit down and write a 50,000 word story is just one of the many talents required to make it in writing.

I need a plan. I need focus. Otherwise I'll be like countless aspiring writers and scribble away, never really spending the valuable time required to find out what it is publishers or readers are looking for.

Watch this space...

Until then, some excepts from my stories:

The God Squad

They pinned the struggling girl to the gurney, straining as the tiny, slim woman threatened to throw them aside with her flailing limbs.

“Damn, she’s strong!” Mike was laughing hysterically. “I thought she was dead a minute ago and now…”

Thump!

The girl’s flailing arm struck him straight in the nose, knocking the grizzled man to the floor. His nose started bleeding profusely.

“Hold her down!” Doctor Lang ordered, but she realized it was useless. The girl who’d lain there like a corpse a few minutes ago was now fighting with horrific strength.

And screaming. All the while screaming and spitting blood.

Radio Daze (featuring Adventure Eddy)

“Hello,” Eddy crammed his muddled paperwork back into it’s folder. “What are you doing here?”

“Dur!” Mia rolled her eyes. “There’s a bloody great fire going on. I’m a reporter. What do you think I’m doing?”

“Oh,” Eddy realized she was holding a microphone and a tiny bit of kit he’d later learn was a minidisk recorder.

Mia ignored him, heading towards the crowd.

“Oh, this is great,” she complained. “I’m never going to get through that lot.”

Eddy stood there dumbly, his papers clutched to his chest.

“Where exactly do you want to go?”

“Where do you think?” Mia wheel around. “Look at those flames! Look at all the action! I need to get over there. I want to chat to the firemen. I want to interview the owner. I want to record the crackling flames on this thing,” she held up the minidisk recorder, “because it’ll make great radio.”

“Well,” Eddy beamed mischievously. “I think I could get you over there.”

Mia Saxon blinked.

“Really?”

“Piece of cake.”

The Goldfinger Chronicles

For twelve weeks now, their routine has been the same.
Captain Northrup enters my cell at nine o’clock.

I am taken to an interrogation room, where I am ‘persuaded’ to release information regarding the whereabouts of my global bullion deposits.

Account numbers. Vault holdings. Anything in order to procure my wealth for their bankrupt little government.

I will tell them nothing.

And until now, their attempts to extract information have been largely unimaginative.
For the first few weeks, it was just talk.

Talk. Questions. Threats.

So much talk that hearing Northrup’s pinched accent bark on could have itself been considered torture.

I told them nothing.

Talk is cheap. Silence is golden.

And gold has always been my obsession

Maybe one of these days, I'll dig one of these stories out and have another crack at it. But until then, it's time to take a break and get my head together.