Nov 262013
Yesterday, I crossed the 50,000 word mark in my horror collection and officially became a winner of NaNoWriMo 2013. I don’t think I’ve ever finished this early before, so it’s odd having these last few days of November free of desperate writing.
If you read my post when I reached the halfway point, you know I had nine stories that ranged from decent to just plain weird. The second half of the month expanded the collection to include:
10. A flash story about creepy murders
11. A flash story attempting to improve that emotion eater from the earlier story
12. A flash story about creepy monsters
13. A short story that rambled on for a bit before deciding it was probably a monster story
14. A creepy murderer story that has potential, but didn’t work well as a part of NaNoWriMo (I’ll definitely come back to this one, though)
15. Yet another yokai story
16. A cultist serial killer story I wrote on 11/21, in honor of Walter Sullivan
17. A weird short story about the dangers of being consumed by revenge
18. An unfinished story that varies between being about an evil psychologist, murder, and crazy assassins
I’ll probably go back and finish the 18th story eventually, once I have a better idea of what it’s about. (Right now it sounds like I was hammering out ideas when what I really wanted to do was think about Dual Destinies. Which is exactly what I was doing.) NaNoWriMo may not have been as desperate a race as it’s been for me in past years, but my ideas definitely started to run out. I spent much of the second half of the month staring at a blank screen while struggling to think of something horrific.
Nevertheless, I’m glad I did this project. It was nice to create lots of short stories again. I haven’t done that in a while. Still, maybe next year I’ll return to the novel format–at least I won’t have to constantly come up with new plots.