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No Graceful Exit

By ana (Thu Nov 30, 2006 at 09:27:54 AM EST) nano, nanowrimo, writing, graceful exit (all tags)

Which means, either ungraceful exit (think helicopters off the embassy roof), or no exit at all, and Iraq becomes State 51.

Of course, the same source argued that the choices were "stay the course" or "cut and run", and they're no longer "staying the course". Perhaps "cut and run" is the same thing as "ungraceful exit".

And speaking of ungraceful exits, I finished my NaNoWriMo novel.

50,000 words in a month is rather a long haul. And for what? Something that's a bit too small to be a novel by contemporary standards, and way too long to be a short story. A novella, perhaps.

This time I started out with a few goals other than just writing 50,000 words with a story hidden in there someplace.

One main character
An evil one at that, though at least sometimes sympathetic
Internal conflict
Survival (for the author)

I guess I kinda made all that happen. The villain in last year's story was a cardboard cutout, without much in the way of motivation, with a background that made no sense. So I decided to try to tell his story, looking over his shoulder for excerpts from his life.

Frequent ana-readers will be amazed that [a] he's male, and [b] he's straight. But hey. Maybe I've learned something about Life, the Universe, and Everything, and the coffee mug my partner bought me may no longer be entirely true. (Mine is conspicuously missing the rainbow colored flowers.)

Pacing was a bit awkward at times. I don't think I reserved quite enough month or chapter space to contain the important bits of the action from last year; so maybe it needs to be read with that one (after changing things so that they actually mesh). Perhaps, one day, looooong after November is past, I can make one sustained narrative out of both of these, plus a lot of other stuff I wrote long ago.

One interesting thing about a retired activist of the quasi-legal variety is that he has lots and lots of aliases. I saved up my spam most of the month and harvested the "from" lines for likely looking names. And then discovered, just this week, that one character in common to the two novels in fact had 3 different names in last year's. :-/

Anyway. It's done. That's all I care about for today.

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