NaNoWriMo: Clockwork Dragon

[wyld_dandelyon]

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?

Comments

[tigertoy.livejournal.com]

Um, not to be rude or anything, but it's Butch Honeck, not Bruce Honek. His web site is http://www.honecksculptures.com/ .

As for NaNoWriMo -- I tried it last year, but November is just hopeless for me. I petered out at 13K words. This year, the ideas that I can't put aside are stuff I'm scared to share.

I went back and looked at the file from last year's NaNo attempt to get the word count, and found myself reading the first page, and liking what I found there a lot. Maybe I will get myself to work on that story again.

[wyld-dandelyon.livejournal.com]

Thank you!!! I hate getting people's names wrong, and wanted to attribute it correctly. But I have a heck of a time getting names to stick in my brain. (I'm addicted to the fact that people wear name tags at cons!)

November isn't ideal for me either.

[wyld-dandelyon.livejournal.com]

So register at NaNo as John Doe and write what you need to write. You can decide whether or not to share it with anyone later, but in the meantime, you get it out of your system, and work through whatever is making these ideas impossible to put aside.

And maybe once you've worked it through, it won't be so scary.

Or maybe it will be scary enough to sell big.