NaNoWriMo: The Reread

I’ve spent most of the day reading “Blood Tide,” the NaNoWriMo novel I finished in November. I copied a PDF of it over to my iPad, so I could read it without being tempted to start editing on the fly.

As I guessed would be the case, it’s not good. It doesn’t help that at some point I did a sloppy global name change in the backup text file I used for reading today. Back while I was writing the novel, I renamed a character from Ted to Charlie, and I guess I didn’t make the search-and-replace text specific enough. I didn’t realize how many words end in “-ted” until they all got Charlied in my draft. The result was definitely unanticipaCharlie, and in some parts it made the story almost unreadable. D’oh.

That’s easily fixed, of course, but some of the other problems won’t be so simple. I can sense the biggest issue: While the characters and the location are all really vivid in my head, that vividness isn’t translating to the page just yet. Everything feels like Barbies that I’m moving through a generic vinyl dollhouse. They aren’t jumping off the page with fully-realized lives of their own.

And the story itself goes through long passages where very little happens other than talking. That simply won’t do for a horror story. I want it to be atmospheric, but I also want stuff to happen. Scary stuff.

There’s also the usual NaNoWriMo issue of lots of clunky writing that I forced myself to ignore, promising my spluttering Inner Editor that I’d go back and fix it later. And later is definitely Now.

But I think those things are all fixable. I think this story might be good after it’s done. Next stop: Outlining the whole thing. I hate doing this because outlines remind me of boring research papers in high school and college, but they’ve been helpful with identifying plot issues in my past novels.

I think I’m going to like this one when it’s done. Whether anyone else will like it? I guess that’s the next hurdle.