Starting tomorrow, a sizable portion of novelists will heed the web-whistle and charge out of the trenches into a month-long slog against tiredness, daily life and work constraints, and family members telling them to get a real job (or alternatively, get a better real job). The goal: write a 50,000-word manuscript by the end of November.
In this analogy, I’m a random artillery-gunner sitting at the back of the line. I’m assembling a painstaking grid-map of the entire front because, hey, I might have to bombard it eventually!
You see, I am participating in NaNoWriMo, but not by writing a single contained manuscript. No, I’m doing something obnoxiously unique:
LOREMAGEDDON
Yes, you read that right–and if past statistics on this blog are anything to go by, that’s just about the only thing of mine you’re likely to read for the next month!
(Which is actually quite a shame because I go out of my way to make sure my lore articles are written with properly peppy high-fantasy prose and not at all like textbooks, but this is the problem with writing cool ideas in a medium that readers naturally assume will bore them snoring.)
You see, I subscribe to the idea that ideas are important! Ideas like culture and philosophy, weapons technology and farming methods and education systems and music and art and a hundred obscure points of world history. And also the Principle of Imbuement, but that’s an extremely special case.
Many of the strongest ideas in my writing come from my lore. So it follows that while I’m waiting on agents to RECOGNIZE THE TRANSHUMAN MAJESTY OF MY INTELLECT pick up The Necromancer and the Revenant for representation, I should write as much lore as humanly possible to inform the later books in my series. A minimum 2,000 words a day on the same topic for the entire month should do the trick.
This is happening whether you read it it or not and all of it will be posted right here on my blog. You can take it or leave it, but I must write it.
Ashenvein Gate: Stories & Dreams 