2025, November - Unnamed Novel Writing Challenge: Switch
I wanted to write something similar to my usual stuff, that is sci-fi action thrillers, and I already noticed a problem in the months leading up to November, in that I can't seem to be able to write decently short ones. Part of it is the process of describing world building processes, part of it is that I have trouble ending plots in sci-fi settings in ways that aren't horribly bleak. In a way, it's loyal to the cyberpunk genre, I suppose, but I rarely set out to write cyberpunk.
I'm also divorcing myself from the NaNoWriMo label, on account of all the stuff that happened. I was never active in the community, so I just found out late this year that there had been issues, and since I don't technically need to attach myself to the org to write fiction, I won't do so from here on out.
I started the month about 10000 words in, and not remotely through the first act, which, I'd argue is bad. I don't like to do explicit world-building in the text. As a fan of third person limited, I think concepts are best explained when interacting with them, or when introduced to the point of view character. So those 10000 words consisted mostly of (relatively) dense plot. I tend toward writing long plots in which a lot happens, and once the month started, I had to make a conscious effort to steer things toward a conclusion.
The initial setup of the world would have lent itself to a much more detailed plot, had I planned to resolve the conflict. I would realize later that leaving the overarching conflict intact was the better narrative decision. The setting would have also allowed for a lot more action in this action-thriller than would ultimately end up in it, because the way I tend to characterize my players through how they act when in situations of stress. However, the thriller/exploration aspect ran away with me this time, and it ended up as a story of two factions: One trying to figure out to reproduce a phenomenon of a freak accident, and one trying to investigate that first one, each separated by a war between their countries. Those familiar with my views will easily read the cold war allegories out of the text, which are intentional. The ending is also intentional, though perhaps a little slanted toward the side I favour. As I wrote the ending, I couldn't help but think of the last piece of Cold War fiction I read, John LeCarre's The Spy Who Came In From The Cold. Its ending was very decisive, but painted neither side in a very good light. I allowed myself to borrow its tone.
I had little trouble with the wordcount this time. It only started getting more difficult toward the end, because that was when all of my weekends suddenly disappeared, and I had somewhat banked on the ability to sit down and think a little on those days. It's also the first book that was written on phones by a significant margin. I never used to like writing text on phones, but since I gave myself a daily word goal to hit outside of November as well, I started typing my 100-some words on a phone during my commute with some regularity. Turns out, it makes authoring long texts possible, if not enjoyable. Nowadays though, I don't just produce text at the speed at which it takes me to type the words, but rather at the speed at which I come up with things, so being slower on a touchscreen doesn't impede the process as much. I suppose an alternative model would be to make a sketch on a phone and execute the details on a proper keyboard, but I've yet to transition into serious enough of a person to adapt structured work habits.
The writing process this time was inhibited primarily by how broken my schedule is slowly turning out to be, and also by the fact that I started getting ideas for stories that maybe would have been easier to write. Now that I'm scribbling into that paper journal, I can at least stop from writing first scenes for all the stories to pin down the tones and the key scenes, but perhaps the familiarity with the genre had a negative impact this time.
Lastly, this is the only thing I'm posting as a monthly this November, because it ate all my spare time, and anything I would have wanted to start doing seriously would have required more of my attention. I suppose I learned Java in the latter half of the month and am now relatively fluent, but learning new well-constructed (?) programming languages is barely an achievement, after one already knows 5 of them.
Here’s the Link to the finished PDF, directly exported from the markdown software I’m using.