[CONTEST OVER] JNC Original Light Novel Contest
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I woke up this morning with the first fully formed half of a story that's completely different than the one I was originally writing for the contest in my mind.
Has this ever happened to any of you guys, you start writing one thing and then your brain starts spitting out something that's completely totally dissimilar?
Well I guess I'm going to be trying to write two stories before the contest ends now....
“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, I've never had that happen to me, but I did wake up one morning a few weeks before the JNC competition was announced knowing the basic outline of the story that I'm writing now right down to the title. It seems strange enough to me though that the brain can do this at all, let alone that it should do it whilst someone is already writing a different story.
If I have the time, which I very much doubt, I'd like to get two stories in as well because I have the first few thousand words of a sci-fi story that's set so far in the future it might as well be fantasy and I realised that it might make a good sort of isekai too if I can bring someone from the present day into it.
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@Angelus well, to be fair to my brain, the idea for this second story had been percolating in the back of my mind for a while; but it all came into focus with detail this morning
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@Lily-Garden You see that Mumblemumble post above? That was me scrapping about 50K words of text to redo (twice!) the entire story of Bounded Fate at that point. And that's ignoring the fact that I have another entirely different narrative in Motive & Means that I've yet to start on.
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@zwabbit personally I'm just impressed you had written 50k
I might be lucky if either story makes to the word count requirement by the deadline at the rate I'm currently going...
“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 said in [SUBMISSIONS NOW OPEN!] JNC Original Light Novel Contest:
Has this ever happened to any of you guys, you start writing one thing and then your brain starts spitting out something that's completely totally dissimilar?
I've had that happen to me three times since the beginning of the contest, two were ideas I've been stewing on for a while but a completely original idea struck me out of the blue. I actually wrote like 3k words on it before I realized it's not even a novel.
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@Lily-Garden Just have fun!—and for what it’s worth—when I say to you to “just have fun”—I am probably mostly trying to convince myself to do that. I can't help but get caught up in delusions of grandeur with this —but realistically the most I will probably get out of this is a so-so story that I might finish some day and the chance to talk about that attempt here. I know I need to be okay with that—but honestly the delusions are kind of fun, too!
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The only person that I really have to bounce my story ideas off of really trashed the ending I have been working on. I guess I probably shouldn't keep it—I sort of enjoyed working on it—but now I am a little down—and I really don't know how this is going to end. (and, I have a lot more to write outside of the ending).
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@jazzyjeoff as a relative stranger from forum-land, I just want to say "keep at it!" and encourage you just like you have been encouraging me
And in my completely totally & utterly uninformed opinion I think you wrote a decent ending (or at least I imagine it to be 😉)
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Whenever someone criticizes a work of mine, there is a sort of checklist I apply to determine whether the criticism is warranted or applicable.
- Are there any actionable improvements within the criticism?
- Is the criticism raised consistent or coherent within the context of the narrative itself, or is something being asked of that's impossible to begin with?
- Does the criticism align with the actual story that I am personally interested in writing?
By and large if someone outright "trashes" something, it indicates a mismatch in personal taste between what is being written and what the reader wants to read. While there can certainly be legitimate criticism of a work that centers around technical inaccuracies (coughCheat Blacksmithcough), if a reader's feedback is centered around how the story is not of the type or content that they themselves are interested in, there's nothing really that can be done to improve the work by trying to take into account such feedback. At the end of the day, you are writing a story that you yourself are interested in. If the end that results in is not what some prospective reader wants, there's no point in forcing either to try to reconcile with each other.
In other words, write what you want, be it ending or other parts. At the end of the day, unless you're personally happy with what you have, you won't be able to do the most important bit of all this, which is to actually write something out.
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Endings? Because I usually write from the outside in, the ending gets written fairly early on. Which can be a problem in itself because I then have to make everything in middle result in that ending. And right now, I'm having second thoughts because there are certain events I need to happen in order to make my ending a reality (including one scene already written that I really don't want to ditch) that will inevitably damage the MC's personal integrity in the eyes of some readers. I guess he's just a Flawed Hero®, though, which in the best case might make him seem more human. [Edit] Although sometimes I feel it's verging on "no real person would behave like that". Oh well.
As for letting someone else read it before I submit it, that will happen but that person is into "real" novels and has never read a light novel before so if I get a negative review I can put it down to that. Maybe.
Anyway, 25k words done (plus a further 5k of "fanbook" background stuff), another 25k to go although I think I might need to increase my target length if things start to seem rushed in the midsection. [Edit] And lengthening the midsection might actually make the MC seem like less of a heartless bastard. Hmm, need to sleep on that.
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It is a shame that this did not come a year earlier. I had just got my first novel published and starting to write the second of the series.
Japanese light novels were the inspiration for me to start writing.Author of Praetor's Blood.
Find out more at www.jmacnovels.com -
@custodes Congrats on getting published!
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Submitted my entry. :)
Glad I spotted this when I did. In a spot of lucky timing, I had one I was about to self-publish, so all it needed was a bit of editing to get the word count down to competition limits. Ended up on 99967. (So long as contractions are counted as one word, anyway. If not, I'm screwed...)
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@cathfach We're not going to police things to the individual word... Thanks for your entry!
Even at this early juncture, not even 1 month since we opened submissions, we already have 30 or so entries. I'm sure that will accelerate considerably the closer we get to the deadline in January! I'm starting to get worried that 2 months isn't going to be enough time to judge all the entries to see who gets past the first round...
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Thanks for confirming. :)
If I was particularly worried about it, the sensible thing would have been to ask for clarification on how words were counted before submitting, but LibreOffice told me <100k, so that was good enough for me.
I'm surprised there's only 30-ish entries, though. Allowing in existing not-for-profit stories means there's a massive pool of ready-written stuff people could submit. A quick scan of royal road suggests 3000-ish possibilities from there alone, so in the worst case, you could have a hundred times as many to sort through. :p
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Took a week longer than intended because of revisions and etc, but first entry, By Honor Bound, is submitted, at ~42K words, and it's only this short because I explicitly capped myself to what amounts to an introductory arc. The story proper would likely be upwards of 300K words if I were to do the entire thing.
Now onto Motive & Means, in which we get to find out just how much worse a cure can be than the disease it's intended to treat.
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I'm currently at around 32K words with my story Elements of the Field. I'd hoped to have got further by now because I really do want to get another story in as well if I can, but Elements kind of expanded in scope this last week so I'm calling what I'm working on right now volume 1 and there will need to be 3 more volumes after that (it has to be 1 volume or 4 because reasons). I'm still targeting 50K words for volume 1 plus the now 6K words of "fanbook" content I've already got.
My biggest problems currently are a few plot holes that I need to work through, so that might take a few days to sort out, and death flags - I think I have a chapter with too many of them!
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Well, I think I am going to keep my ending—tweaking it a bit—though the criticism probably still fits—I am at risk of putting something hokey and unrealistic in a place that I definitely dont want it. But maybe it will work well enough that it won’t matter. Still have a lot of other things to figure out—and even the stuff that is there is mostly only roughed in —I have a lot of dialogue and some action, but lacking in world-building, transitions and polish. Still, I feel better about it than I did a week ago, though I am not on schedule for finishing on time.
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Well, since this is what brought me out of my writing slumber and created an account, this shall be my first post here.
Haha. It is good to be awake again
