NaNoWriMo: Day 4 Update

Day 4: 7,400~ words. That puts me slightly ahead of the day to day words-to-day curve to hit 50,000. So far, I'm taking it slow and steady. I'm also keeping in mind that people publish Stephen King, so I don't need to worry too much about quality.

... I don't know why I make fun of Stephen King, I just do. In reality, I know that he writes some very good things, and he is also, both technically and economically, a more successful writer than I am. But... picking on him is just cathartic. Also, some very bad things. It's all about finding balance in your writing. Also, the key is finding a way to balance the tone you want to feel for your piece, which is something I'm not very good at. For example, right now, I spent a lot of time this morning (about four or five hours), pruning through about 600 words to try and capture a good back and forth between the human scientist and the two mice he captured.

I'm running into all sorts of issues with trying to keep too much human terminology from creeping in, without the writing feeling forced and alien. The other thing is to keep the mice from calling themselves mice. I kind of like both of our mice right now; they feel human, in a way that I like. Sadly, I think they feel a bit too goofy in this scene, compared to the previous scenes. I've decided that that is OK though, for now. The key was just to get through this scene so that we can move to getting the rest of the plot in motion as our hero now has his quest laid out in front of him.

My current analysis is that this may turn out to be a bad execution for the story. Mood whiplash does that. On the one hand, two mice captured by a scientist who does tests on mice should be a scene that is played for terror, not laughs. On the other hand, the tone of the story will be getting darker before it lightens at the end. Also, I think I went a bit too dark in the opening few thousand words, and so I wanted to pull that back to try and strike a more even tone. I don't know if I have succeeded in that, and I probably won't know until I complete the whole thing and give it an editing pass.

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P.S.,

Two things. First, for those interested in the Final Fantasy Marathon, in Final Fantasy 1, we're just reaching Elf Land and are average party level 5 (Warrior, Thief, White Mage, Black Mage. I think this is the party that makes the best use of unique equipment by being able to use the special hammer (White Mage), the ninja sword, the knight sword and the Masamune (equipped to the Black Mage.)

Second, at some point last night, the blog made it past its 10,000th hit, thanks to what looks like someone went on an archive binge through the Gaming tagged posts. Assuming I'm reading my metrics right, this is the post (or possibly this one) that got the 10,000th click. They are actually ones I'm particularly proud of.