Productivity and exciting things

I love editing. I really love editing. I would like to take editing out for dinner and then raise two beautiful children with editing. For me, it’s just a really nice feeling to be able to print out something, get out a red pen and then scribble all over the page, cackling ‘AHAHA, PAST ALISON, YOU ARE A FOOL AND I CAN WRITE BETTER THAN YOU NOW’. Or, if I can’t write better than my past self, I can at least fix some of her mistakes.

For NaNoWriMo last year, I completed the third draft of my novel that I started in 2011. It started off as a fifteen minute short film script that I’d written for a uni assessment and now it’s more of a novella than a novel. I don’t really know what the point of this post is, but I guess it’s just funny how things change. My MC is a lot happier than she was in the first draft, she has a different name and a different mother. She’s more lost in her life than she was, but that’s okay. Her story is about the unknown, I guess, and it fits that she can’t find her direction. When she’s confronted by other versions of herself (parallel universes and science fiction ahoy!), they sort of become the antagonists and it does scare me a little bit. These doppelgangers weren’t as scary in the first version of the draft (they weren’t even in the film script) and I think the worst thing is that they’re just different versions of my main character. They’re all biologically the same, just my MC has made different choices in her life and, as she makes those choices, she creates the doppelgangers. She’d made them this way and she doesn’t even realise it.

Anyway, not sure if that made sense without any more context and that would be a bit too complicated to shove into one blog post, so I am sorry for my ramblings.

So, onto the exciting things!

1. In my last post, I talked about how I was in a competition. And guess who won it! For the prize, I get an illustration to go with my story, and it will also be published in the journal. I do believe it comes out in February, and I will probably spam a link at some point.

2. I have this friend who is super amazing at drawing (amongst other things) and next year we are going to attempt to create a graphic novel. I’ve no idea what it’s going to be about, but it’s going to be awesome because we are awesome. I’ve never really done anything creative with anyone else before. Writing for me is a super-private thing and so I’m not sure how this is going to go, but, onwards!

NaNoWriMo

So NaNo is almost here again! How exciting.

This year I completed Camp NaNo in August and wrote 70k (plus 58 words!) and had a ball. I didn’t plan it at all, which is something I now realise I should never ever do because everything goes to shit and I’m left scrambling about for any kind of direction. It was terribly fun, but not something I want to repeat any time soon.

For November’s NaNo I’m going to redraft last year’s NaNo. Which is kind of cheating but I am super hardcore like that, yo.

My story features parallel universes and lesbians! It’s pretty fun to write but there are some spooky things in there. When I write at night time I get too scared to go to the toilet because I will clearly be eaten by DEMONS.

Here’s my profile. We should probably be friends!

I also took the liberty of making a super-terrific cover for this year’s novel. I was thinking maybe desktop publishing could be my back-up career.