It’s the first of December! We’ve actually made it 11 out of 12 months already. Compared to some of the previous years it’s been a bit less chaotic in our corner of the world, which was a pleasant change of pace. Let’s just not talk about the elections that just happened here in the Netherlands and just move on with our lives, shall we? With November completely done, I can proudly say that for the third year in a row I have managed to write a Hesitant Hero draft of 50.000 words. 50.333 to be exact. I definitely cut it close and wrote the last 1000 or so words yesterday, but a goal reached is a goal reached. I’ll talk more about the draft itself (without going into major spoilers of course) later in this post, but first let’s talk about the blog and upcoming posts.
As most of you have probably noticed, my upload schedule throughout November was more or less non-existent. I spent a lot of time at work. We had a test week, meeting about student progression and I even had a four hour course on practicing student teacher talks. So outside of work and finishing up my 1600 or so words for every day I didn’t really have the time and energy to add blog posts to the mix. I really should have prepared some ahead of time, but with work taking up most of my energy since August I didn’t really feel like doing so. Regardless, I’m hoping to bring back somewhat regular posts this month, and definitely be back on a normal schedule when the new year starts. As for today’s ‘The Necromancer’s Daughter’ chapter, that is unfortunately still a little while from being done. I’ll work on it this upcoming week and I hope to post it before next weekend. So apologies for the delay, but it’s still coming your way this month.
That brings us back to NaNoWriMo itself. I had some days where I really struggled, which happens every year of course, and almost didn’t write at all. But I found that every time I got started, I would eventually write much more than I thought I was capable of. That’s kind of the point of this challenge, forcing yourself to sit down and write, only to then find out that it’s not as hard as you thought it would be. I had a pretty decent plan of where the plot would go before I sat down, which is different from volume 2. This meant that a lot of the main plot points from this draft will probably stay as they are. A lot of the details and pacing will need work, as they’re kind of all over the place. I feel like I’ve spent too much time on fragmented topics that should become more aligned and more goal oriented. I need to make sure the timeline of all historic events is actually in order and not a random guess that my sleep deprived brain takes every day. I am quite pleased with how the big conclusion of this arc has turned out. Things have gone a little bit differently from what I originally had in mind, but that’s how it always is, right?
Two other things that stood out to me this time is the fact that I didn’t close all the open storylines. I was initially planning on rounding out this volume as a sort of trilogy ending, setting up a nice clean start to the next problem. In a sense this is true, as the story it covers in this volume comes to a close and goes into a bit of a hiatus so to speak, but it’s far from over. We will see some of the things started here back in a later volume, assuming I get to write many more. A second thing I didn’t foresee is the romance storyline that I added. It’s not something I planned to do at all, but once I introduced a character to the story it immediately made sense for me to take the story that way. Writing this storyline was definitely a challenge. Although I’ve had my share of romance in the past, I’ve never considered myself to be particularly comfortable with the concept. It’s not that I don’t have an interest in it, but I’m not quick to search for it. I do love romantic stories though, I think that might be part of why my expectations for romance are a little bit unrealistic at times. Either way, it was a lot of fun figuring out how to approach all of this in a fantasy setting while making it both realistic and light. I hope I succeeded in doing so, I really like the storyline myself.
I think that covers most of it. I want to go back and properly design some of the backstreets of Marsolin. The majority of the story takes place in this forest city filled with art and literature and I really want to bring the place to life. But for now, I’m taking a couple of weeks off from the Hesitant Hero. You can expect the first chapter of Volume 3 to be posted on the first Friday of 2024, look forward to it.
Thanks for your support these past few years, it’s done a great job in keeping me motivated to keep writing and I have big goals for next year which include finally sending a story to a publisher. I don’t have big expectations of that turning into anything, but if I don’t send it out it’ll never get published. Now then, my train is almost at its destination and I got a literature class on the horizon that I’m not looking forward to. I’ll post this afterwards though, but as usual, thanks for reading!
Opal Kaharis 