wyld_dandelyon | NaNoWriMo: Clockwork Dragon (Reply)

The NaNoWriMo website has a number of fun things going for it. Part of it is just stuff to keep you excited and on-track, like different types of word-count widgets. Part of it is social networking-type stuff. I'm not sure which one the "Novel Info" page is, but it has a spot to upload a mock cover.

Now this is not the cover I imagine for the finished work (for that I've been imagining one of the main characters actually working on a clockwork dragon), but for something thrown together in a short amount of time I'm reasonably pleased.

Attribution: The dragons in this photo are sculptures by the talented Butch Honeck. I expect I'll see him at Windycon; I should print a copy of this mock cover for him, EDIT: website! http://www.honecksculptures.com/ .

There's also a "novel synopsis" spot, which I took to mean "back cover blurb":

Bartholomew has been hired to investigate whether the playboy, metalsmith, clockwork artist, and wizard who calls himself Michelangelo Da Vinci is an appropriate suitor for a rich man's great grand-daughter, Emma. Da Vinci is a study in paradoxes, sensitive and socially clueless, rich, handsome, and popular, but seemingly lacking a past. Why do the vampires seem drawn to him? And what about the pale apparitions that are being seen around the city? Are they ghosts? Angels? Could they be an artist's muse? Or are they perhaps a modern wil-o-the-wisp, luring creative people to commit suicide?

In the meantime, Emma is intelligent and headstrong, and despite her enrollment in a genteel university's literature program and her musical skills, she puts a great deal more energy into studying vampires and other odd creatures and phenomena than to her formal studies. Her interest in jazz led her to Chicago's new speakeasies, where she first met Michelangelo. With his best friend having inexplicably abandoned him, she is perfectly poised to get to know him, and perhaps his mysterious past, better.

On the website, there's also a bit of novel excerpt, edited both to rub some of the first-draft-itis off and because out of context it was lacking some necessary antecedents.

I'm going to try to paste one of the silly graphs here, but if it doesn't work, my word count, for those who care, is currently 13627. Actually, if the widget works the way I expect, for those of you who read this after I update my word count on their website, the widget will update. I think. We'll see!

<img src="http://www.nanowrimo.org/NanowrimoUtils/NanowrimoGraph/447085.png" />

So, writers, what have you been doing? NaNo? Something else? How's it going?

And everybody else, what creative pursuits have you been doing? Gardening? Redecorating? Food? How's that been going?