NaNoWriMo 2022
Day Ten
American Kingdom progress report
In theory, I’m a third of the way through this thing. I’ve just spent a couple of hours rationalising all my stories and reconciling the actual wordage with what my daily total spreadsheet had recorded.
Somewhere I had gone off the rails and pushed on a day ahead of where I should be, at least on my spreadsheet, giving me the impression that I was 1667 words behind.
I’ve now carefully recorded the wordage of all my published chapters, added them to the spreadsheet and I’m pretty much bang on track.
Storywise, my protagonist is just about to step across the threshold into the land of legend and danger.
This probably indicates a novel length of greater than 50,000 words, if I’m to follow the traditional pacing. I’m not going to explore the new world and find a climax in five days or roughly 8,000 words.
That’s okay. If I can keep up this pace, pushing on into December for another ten days will give me a (shortish) novel of about 70,000 words.
I’m not aiming for a super-long read, given my target audience.
We’ll see how this pans out. I really haven’t got more than vague ideas as to how the rest of the thing will go. So far the characters have found ways to tell the story and I’ve been able to keep up with finding the philosophical framework to hold it in place.
So long as I get enough time to sleep and reflect on what comes next and how to get there I think I can trust my subconscious to guide me onward.
I don’t need to see the whole journey in detail through the fog. Just enough to get through a day at a time and that will get me there step by step.
The world
To summarise, my hero, Molly, has at the time of writing moved from her pleasant but rather aimless everyday job of guiding tourists through the city of Charleston in partnership with her lover.
She has discovered a shadowy Christian organisation, apparently founded on the highest motives, with resources and capabilities as yet unknown.
She is about to step across the threshold into the belly of this beast.
As intimated by my novel title, there is a Kingdom of America with Jesus as the (absent) monarch and various levels of nobility beneath. The laws of the USA are held to be of lesser importance to the laws of the Heavenly Kingdom and in fact, so long as one’s faith is pure, any crimes may be forgiven up to the last moments of life.
That is what might be gleaned from a literal interpretation of the New Testament. In reality it is a crappy basis for any sort of moral behaviour and most likely a very long way away from what Jesus actually taught.
Nevertheless, we may construct a society of nobility and fealty on this liberal foundation. Pretty much anything goes, really, so long as the objective of bringing the Heavenly Kingdom closer to an earthly reality is pursued.
I think that this gives me a lot of room for conflict in various arenas. I have only the foggiest notion of how this will play out in this novel, let alone any continued series. I could follow the career of Molly Freytag from private citizen to soldier, officer, knight, countess, princess in the service of His Absent Majesty.
The Medium
Writing this novel on Medium, sometimes paragraph to paragraph, posted for anybody to read more or less in the moments of creation, is an exhilarating activity. Normally one would hide a first draft away from anyone’s sight, release alpha readers to a select group, have the manuscript run past an editor, work on any problems of style and consistency, seek further feedback through advance reading copies and only a year or so later actually publish the book.
I have a fondness for procrastination, so this public writing, at least for NaNoWriMo where thousands of novels of astounding crappiness are created, is my way of keeping my nose to the grindstone.
Realistically, it’s not much of a chore. 1667 words a day is easy. The trick is to have them add up to a story anybody would care to read, let alone pay actual money for.
On that note, my current earnings amount to about 11c a day so right now I’m placing no orders for supercars though I may earn enough over the month for a cup of barista coffee. To go with all the home made stuff I’ve been swilling.
Thank you for reading this far. Any comments, positive or negative, are more than welcome. I’m under no illusions as to the quality of writing or plotting, so don’t feel that I can be offended by honest criticism!
I’ve been trying over the past few days to divide chapters up into scenes. Ten-minute reads are a big ask on Medium but three x three-minute scenes could prove more bite-size for browsers.
And finally, finding a community, not just of writers but of fellow NaNoWriMo participants has been a true joy. I’m not suffering alone in this; there are others equally as insane as I!
Molly