National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) has been invigorating, but it has also taken a lot of time. I finished the thirty-day challenge of 50,000 words in only fifteen days, yesterday, because I have written on average over six hours per day. That is not a pace I can keep up forever. Interestingly, I am surprised that it has interfered with my work as little as it has. It has stopped some other things, though. I have made very little progress in my edit of Neyuki.
I did not have Vision More Glorious all plotted out before I started writing. All that I knew was that I wanted it all to be from the point of view of one first-person narrator (a new exercise for me), and that it would deal with a psychiatric outpatient who takes an experimental drug and has his vision dramatically changed. What flowed out first was a (hopefully) sweet love story. I found at the 30,000-word point of NaNoWriMo (50,000 words total, since I had 20,000 already in the dozen days before November began), that the love story was close to its climax and was leaving me wanting something more, so in the writing after that, it become a novel of suspense as well. Then at about the 45,000 word point, I found the suspense was getting out of hand and the whole thing was becoming too fantastic, and the ending thereafter became more lighthearted. I feel like I now have parts of three different novels. Over the next few weeks, I will get a better idea of what I want to do with what I have written and begin filling in the missing pieces of one of those three novels. I actually have two weeks of NaNoWriMo left. I hope to make some progress in that time.