Post 9 day novel Wrap up

DONE! *faints*

My final word count with the chapter titles removed came to 59295 (a pleasing palindrome of a number).

I've been playing with these characters for less then a year, but they're already huge in my mind, real people. I'm excited to finish this chapter of their lives (I know what continues to happen with them of course, and it may turn into another novel, it may not). But its tinged with sadness. I really love these guys and now I think I should take a break, or I'll never be able to edit this thing.

Halley wants me to send it to her and to get it done by August, which I'm totally for, but I need some separation from it, so I'm going to head into Camp NaNoWriMo which starts today and attempt to keep up with the blogging as I go. Of course, there are fewer words involved with Camp NaNoWriMo, so it might not be as pressure cooking exciting as the 9 Day Novel stuff.

The problem is, now I've got Penny (my lead) stuck in my head. I'm having problems trying to come up with a new character to play with. I started thinking about how I started with Penny and the gang: NaNoWriMo last year where I had a brain wave about 11 days in and decided to do something that was based entirely around five characters that I pulled out of no where.

That novel was not terribly good, I will admit. After all, nothing happened but people running around shooting each other. But I did get five great characters from the exercise of writing about 40,000 words on them (I wrote 50,000 words in November, but only 40,000 of them were for that story). It is at this point, that I have a confession to make. My brother, Jasper, actually was quite instrumental in getting the actual novel I wrote these last 9 days started.

Jasper put up this on his blog, which for some reason spoke to me and resulted in me asking him to illustrate something I wrote. Then of course he was like "Yes! Totally!" and I was like "Crap! I haven't written anything he'd like to draw!"

Luckily I had been kicking around with the idea of doing an Oregon Trail in space story, and had been borrowing the characters from my NaNo to do it, and had this idea of a city in my head, a city made out of giant space ships that had settled in the ground. Anyways, taking that, I threw my five characters into the city and tried to see what would happen.

This was where I met Lee, and what I sent to Jasper: the mixed up beginning of Penny getting into Carys and seeing the great ark ships. This was what Jasper got from it:

It was kind of fabulous (the middle sketch of the woman with her hand on her hip has lead to Lee's expansion) to see what someone else thought of my characters (and typical of Jasper to gravitate to Lee's character, he likes mechanical things) and so it was that I began to search for a way to make their story real.

June came around and I realized I hadn't written anything, and so the 9 Day Novel was born.

Now I'm having problems because WTF am I going to write for Camp NaNoWriMo? Perhaps its time to find some characters again and throw them into something they don't quite understand. :D

9 Day Novel has been great. I've enjoyed it incredibly. I will probably do it again.

Keep watching. Camp NaNoWriMo is up next.