[CONTEST OVER] JNC Original Light Novel Contest
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I was just starting a new story when I heard about this. It might be fun to submit if I end up finishing it.
If I write 5k-10k words a week, I should finish in 10 weeks... So there should be more than enough time at least.
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"Works should be complete stories, as they will be judged only on the submitted text."
Does this mean I have to write a singel light novel volume, that is complete without any second part (like the first Volume in Villainess Level 99 ~I May Be the Hidden Boss but I'm Not the Demon Lord)?
Or may I leave much room for a second volume?
And if no, how is it with the rights for future books playing in the same universe or using those charakters?I already completed writing a book playing in the universe of the storry I am writing for this contest and almost completed the second book of it, though I did not approach a publisher with them for now.
So how should I approach the overall feeling of the novel? Is the complete story a "complete for there will never be anything else" or a "complete story that is fun to read and might be continued if there is demand"?
I need to know if I want to get the right pacing! A hundred thousand words is really not that much. -
@Ade It simply means the story you submit needs to end in some manner, even if it's inconclusive or a cliffhanger. If it cuts off arbitrarily, then you may be judged negatively.
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@myskaros Okay, thats the best answer I could hope for. Thank you
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@Ade I guess another way to put it would be "it should be something where if someone reads it, and it turns our you never wrote any more of that universe/story, that the reader wouldn't feel like their time was wasted reading it"
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Woo! Hoo! I finally made it through a scene that was just dreadful to write—I was stuck on it for weeks! It doesn’t read bad though.
Yay me! -
@jazzyjeoff round of applause👏
“There’s always a story. It’s all stories, really. The sun coming up every day is a story. Everything’s got a story in it. Change the story, change the world.” ― Terry Pratchett, A Hat Full of Sky
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@Lily-Garden
Thank you! Thank you! You’re too kind!So, how are things going on your end? Well—I hope.
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@jazzyjeoff it's been hard to find the space to write with all the reading light novels and anime, not to mention all the other stuff I have to do...
But I have hope that I get back on track soon“There’s always a story. It’s all stories, really. The sun coming up every day is a story. Everything’s got a story in it. Change the story, change the world.” ― Terry Pratchett, A Hat Full of Sky
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@Lily-Garden Well, good luck—and as long as you enjoy it —keep with it!
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@jazzyjeoff Even if we get hundreds of submissions, I bet there will be hundreds more people will have started but never finish. And then of those hundreds, maybe 10s will be fondly remembered by their authors and years later they will finish the story and self publish or apply to the 13th JNC original light novel contest or something and win.... so many things could end up originating here in the future, I can't wait.
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I'm 47K words in now and I think I've sorted out the inconsistencies, MacGuffins and plot holes, but it's hit a sort of mid-life lull where I can see that nothing much is going to happen for a chapter or three. For my usual storytelling style, that's no problem because the less plot there is, the more PLOT I can have, but trying to keep things safe enough for Auntie Amazon is getting really difficult!
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Just wrote a chapter that was the exact opposite of my painful chapter. I just thought I needed a filler chapter between two big events and ended up creating two characters that I really like and will continue through the story. It is so much fun when something like that just falls out of the sky!
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Alright, 3 weeks in and 16k total words so far. I should hopefully reach my goal of 75k words before the first week of January, which gives me a week or so of wiggle room to do whole-draft edits.
We'll see how it goes, but so far so good.
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Ha! I changed the name of my main character over a month ago and I’m still finding her old name sprinkled throughout my story. Of course, if I was using the most simple word editing program I could just do a find and replace—but I am using Wattpad as my editor. Why? I have a bizarre form of laziness—instead of making the one-time tiny effort required to use the right tool for the job—I use something perfectly awful that makes things needlessly inefficient every-single-day. I might as well just use a manual typewriter—at least that would be romantically ineficient —of course, I am much too lazy to actually find a typewriter…
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Still only at 49K words. 2K in 20 days isn't very promising for finishing by the deadline, but my story seems to have gone beyond mid-life lull and entered mid-life crisis mode now! Actually I've written more than 2K because I realised that the part I've been working on would need to fit in with something from a later volume (if it ever gets written) so I wrote a few pages from volume 4 as well just to avoid a possible retcon later on.
@jazzyjeoff, I used to love my manual typewriter, I gave it away to a charity years ago though otherwise you could have had it :)
After reading something captivating, book lovers simply need to talk about it with someone.
—Tearmoon Empire -
@Angelus said in [SUBMISSIONS NOW OPEN!] JNC Original Light Novel Contest:
Still only at 49K words. 2K in 20 days isn't very promising for finishing by the deadline, but my story seems to have gone beyond mid-life lull and entered mid-life crisis mode now! Actually I've written more than 2K because I realised that the part I've been working on would need to fit in with something from a later volume (if it ever gets written) so I wrote a few pages from volume 4 as well just to avoid a possible retcon later on.
@jazzyjeoff, I used to love my manual typewriter, I gave it away to a charity years ago though otherwise you could have had it :)
Ha! From where I stand 49k words sounds like bragging!
(laughing at me —not you, btw) -
Right, that's another 20K words tossed into the bin as I rejig Motive & Means a third time. Hopefully I'll be able to recycle at least some of it. Writing mysteries is such a pain...
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@zwabbit
20k ouch!
That's sort of the demon in the back of my mind, as I decide whether to give my villain a full detailed flashback backstory—or just do it with a much shorter exposition—the exposition would be much easier and has less of a chance of breaking up the flow of the story—but a flashback might draw the reader into the world to greater level and make them understand the villain more than “because evil.” -
Is there an official, industry accepted definition for word count? I'm writing a python script for my own manuscript to tally up the word counts of chapters and for-author-organization-only sub-chapters for easier tracking than relying on manual calculations within my standard document editor. I just don't know whether hyphenated words should count as multiple words, or (not that my story has them but for the sake of program completeness) whether things like stat blocks which have like [+] buttons rendered with text would count as words.
I don't plan to get anywhere near the 100k limit so it shouldn't matter insofar as staying within the bounds of the contest, and I imagine y'all would allow for quite a bit of leeway if the stated word count on the entry form differed from your own calculation of the word count when looking at the manuscript but I would still feel embarrassed if my own totals were off :P
