It’s December. Can you believe that? This year was both incredibly slow yet flew by. Time perception is such a fascinating thing to me. Did you know that the older you get, the faster time feels due to the fact that the time you’re experiencing is becoming a smaller and smaller percentage of your total lived experience. One day out of five feels longer than one day out of a hundred days. I had Mana explain this concept to some of the characters in Volume 2 of the Necromancer’s Daughter.
That’s the main thing I wanted to focus on in this volume. I love the idea that Mana has the possibility to choose what information from her own world she wants to share. I like to think there’s a part of Mana that is very similar to me. She’s a teacher in her old world and she grew up watching MTV and 90s television. I like to bring those things back into my stories. I started this series with the idea that Mana wouldn’t be extremely knowledgeable about important things, that allows me to make her more relatable.
That brings me to NaNoWriMo. It’s always good to reflect on your work. As a teacher, we’re taught to reflect on pretty much everything, and I take that into other parts of my life. What did I do well this year, what did I not do well. And most importantly, did I learn anything from this experience? I’ve written a lot in the past month so I’m not going to spend too much time on this post, since I can use a break. I think this year was similar to last year. I felt less prepared going in. September and October were very busy for me, focusing on teaching and uni assignments. So by the time I got to like chapter seven of this story, I had no idea what direction I wanted to take this story. There’s a lot of room to trim there. My characters travel quite a lot in this volume, but in many places they visit there’s not much going on. Looking back on it, there’s maybe ten chapters or so in which absolutely nothing interesting happens. It’s my job to find out what I can add there, and if there’s nothing to be gained by adding something, I need to get rid of some of the filler. But the point of NaNoWriMo is to keep writing and that’s what I did. For eighteen days in a row I wrote over 2000 words a day. After that I knew I’d make it to the total of 50.000 and ended up slowing down a lot. Especially the last week or so I struggled. I’ve also been a bit overworked lately, so that definitely didn’t help. But I ended strong and have twenty-six chapters to work with. I’m quite pleased with the results. I’m going to take December off and not write a lot of blog posts. Instead I want to edit the first few chapters of this story as well as get back to The Necromancer’s Daughter. Remember when I used to upload those? They’ve been on hold for a long time now, and I’ve been thinking a lot about what direction to take the story. I’ve started reading more stories as well and I’ve been taking inspiration from those. I think a more proper road for that story is forming in my mind and I’m excited to explore it.
With another year of NaNoWriMo in the bag, I really should set high goals for myself for 2023. But I’ll talk about that in the new year, when it’s time to share our New Year Resolutions. For now, I’m taking it slow. I am very appreciative of the support lately, even in a slow month like November views have been high which makes me very happy. Thanks for reading.
Opal Kaharis 