[CONVENTION APPEARANCE] Anime Expo 2023 with J-Novel Club!

jazzyjeoff

@Anti-i25 yeah, I might be at 10K, too. But my setting is pretty non-descript and the tone is sort of uneven. That’s the thing about only having messed around with fan-fiction—those things are already done for you. Now I have to think about world-building and describing scenery and whatnot. Even putting together something that is original but tropey is a lot more work.

@Lily-Garden Character sheets? —yikes—sounds so organized! ;)
I think Mike Tyson said, “everyone has a plan—until they get hit.” That’s pretty much the way my plots and characters work—I start with a plot and some characters—and then the characters pretty much ignore everything I have planned out for them (and somehow I end up being the one getting beat up!)

Anyway —it’s so nice to hear from folks—have fun and good luck!

Angelus

@jazzyjeoff said in [CONVENTION APPEARANCE] Anime Expo 2023 with J-Novel Club!:

...original but tropey...

You know, that's it. That's the problem I'm running into in a nutshell. How many tropes does a LN need to qualify as a LN? Worried that I didn't have enough, I added a brocon imouto just in case 😄

jazzyjeoff

@Angelus said in [CONVENTION APPEARANCE] Anime Expo 2023 with J-Novel Club!:

@jazzyjeoff said in [CONVENTION APPEARANCE] Anime Expo 2023 with J-Novel Club!:

...original but tropey...

You know, that's it. That's the problem I'm running into in a nutshell. How many tropes does a LN need to qualify as a LN? Worried that I didn't have enough, I added a brocon imouto just in case 😄

Just put “Villainess” somewhere in the title and I think you’ll be safe —yes, even if it’s BL (wait, that sounds more interesting than the thing I am working on —Arrg!)

ShipTeaser

I'm plotted and happy with it. Going to start doing 5-10k a week soon to.fit around my other project

Lily Garden

@jazzyjeoff I've never written anything fiction wise longer than say 2 pages so I figured that if I'm going to try to write a whole 35000 or more words then I'm going to need to have a bit of organization to make sure that I have some things like you know character consistency and whatnot

I don't trust my brain to remember all the things so I decided to be best to put it down on paper

Lily Garden

@Angelus for me I didn't worry about any of the tropes, I don't think I'm a great enough writer to try to control how tropey my writing is. I just tried to think of something I would like to read on J-novel Club that there isn't a bunch of and that I think I could actually you know write.

Imagining my story as if it is its anime adaptation has been helpful though

jazzyjeoff

@Lily-Garden said in [CONVENTION APPEARANCE] Anime Expo 2023 with J-Novel Club!:

@jazzyjeoff I've never written anything fiction wise longer than say 2 pages so I figured that if I'm going to try to write a whole 35000 or more words then I'm going to need to have a bit of organization to make sure that I have some things like you know character consistency and whatnot

I don't trust my brain to remember all the things so I decided to be best to put it down on paper

Oh, I would love to be more organized. And this is pretty much a first for me, too. And since there is a pretty good chance that I won’t finish in time, I am going to at least enjoy the process and maybe enjoy a little bit of camaraderie with folks doing the same. So, please take anything I say in that spirit!

ShipTeaser

Well, i'm probably not the right person to give advice on quantity, as my main webnovel is up to 1.7 million words lol, but...

Generally, once you start getting the words down, it becomes easier..first 1000 words.is the hardest. At 10,000 you're commited and habits have formed so the next 10k are easier as you've got the flow and the reward of seeing your words on page...

So, yeah, I think it gets easier. The first steps are always the hardest lol

In terms of writing, might not work for anyone else, but for me, I imagine I am the characters I'm.writing, and I find words flow from there

zwabbit

At around 30K words at this point. Aiming for 60K for the narrative arc that I'd submit, for this story at least. There's another story that I think might be even more enjoyable due to the character dynamics I've envisioned, but it would be much more complicated to write. That second story might warrant actual planning and a bit of background research so I'm not doing "forging of swords using molds."

Lily Garden

@jazzyjeoff said in [CONVENTION APPEARANCE] Anime Expo 2023 with J-Novel Club!:

@Lily-Garden said in [CONVENTION APPEARANCE] Anime Expo 2023 with J-Novel Club!:

@jazzyjeoff I've never written anything fiction wise longer than say 2 pages so I figured that if I'm going to try to write a whole 35000 or more words then I'm going to need to have a bit of organization to make sure that I have some things like you know character consistency and whatnot

I don't trust my brain to remember all the things so I decided to be best to put it down on paper

Oh, I would love to be more organized. And this is pretty much a first for me, too. And since there is a pretty good chance that I won’t finish in time, I am going to at least enjoy the process and maybe enjoy a little bit of camaraderie with folks doing the same. So, please take anything I say in that spirit!

Will do comrade 🫡 😉

I’m normally not an organized person myself but if I’m going to have any chance of completing such a big project then I know I will need to be

zwabbit

So it's probably not the best idea for anyone to be sharing detailed plot ideas and the like, but it might still be interesting to share titles we've come up with. It'd be a fun peek into the ideas each of us are coming up with without running too much risk of leaking whatever special sauce we're putting into our works. Thus far I've sketched out two narratives, with the following titles.

Bounded Fates - By Duty Bound
But For Me It Was Wednesday - Motive & Means

As an aside, Microsoft Word apparently did not like my usage of & in a document title and encoded it as ^0.

ShipTeaser

@zwabbit said in [CONVENTION APPEARANCE] Anime Expo 2023 with J-Novel Club!:

So it's probably not the best idea for anyone to be sharing detailed plot ideas and the like, but it might still be interesting to share titles we've come up with. It'd be a fun peek into the ideas each of us are coming up with without running too much risk of leaking whatever special sauce we're putting into our works. Thus far I've sketched out two narratives, with the following titles.

Bounded Fates - By Duty Bound
Motive & Means

As an aside, Microsoft Word apparently did not like my usage of & in a document title and encoded it as ^0.

Ugh, i'm struggling so much with the title, it's so much harder that coming up with the plot itself... When I crack it I don't mind sharing though...

Lily Garden

@ShipTeaser what I do is come up with a placeholder title so I can focus more on the details of the story
It’s tricky coming up with the right title so I gonna put it off till the end

ShipTeaser

@Lily-Garden said in [CONVENTION APPEARANCE] Anime Expo 2023 with J-Novel Club!:

@ShipTeaser what I do is come up with a placeholder title so I can focus more on the details of the story
It’s tricky coming up with the right title so I gonna put it off till the end

Yeah. I think that's wise!

geetop

Doesn't a title have to contain half the story these days?

Title that goes something like:
I put my extra long title for the contest in the forum and someone stole my idea; now my life is ruined!

Sorry I am being a bit silly

Good luck to all the contestants!

jazzyjeoff

Submissions and full rules are now open!
https://j-novel.club/jncolncontest-application

jazzyjeoff

How long and detailed should the synopsis be?

Is the purpose of it to give a summary of the major events that occur in the story, including the ending—so the judges don't have to read the whole thing?
—or is the synopsis more of a blurb that only gives a general idea of what the story is about—to get someone interested in the story? (sort of like the short intros that J-novel does for its stories)?

Edit: I found this general suggestion online--
https://www.annemini.com/category/how-to/how-to-write-a-synopsis-for-a-contest/