day 16 and 17- a new assassin appears!

Reading Le Carre novels to get a sense of his prose and style. He skips around a lot, uses flashbacks and stuff, which I've already been trying to incorporate into the text, but there are a few things I've been picking up on as well

• I've been keeping things basically tight third-person on Moone? But Le Carre hops into different characters heads a lot. That's another thing I've been trying to do, but now I should do it more deliberately.
• He describes characters' physical appearances. Also a lot of his characters are European. So he describes a lot of them speaking Europeanese.
• People say their inner turmoil out loud, or point out other people's, but it's mostly external. I've got lengthy musings on character motivation and stuff, but it's mostly internal. We can fix that in post if we want.
• Le Carre doesn't have action scenes. He has violence scenes.
• That being said he's still got a good hand for suspense

So there was a probe, in 1992!, the FBI investigating the CIA for the Iran-Contra affair, which is just like perfect for how Moone and Unwin like get together, or get set at each other's throats, or something. Some supernatural equivalent of the Iran-Contra probe. There's this book, Wedge: The Secret war between the FBI and CIA, by Mark Riebling, that has more information specifically on that, and it's all about the history of why the FBI and CIA hate each other even though there's no constitutional basis for their separation of jurisdictions. Need to check that out. It was a coincidence that Moone and Unwin's history is even vaguely mid-80s and Middle-Eastern; I implied that Moone entered the djinn world in Pakistan, but tying it in to Iran-Contra wouldn't be difficult, just move that sucker to Persia instead. Although that does make the Urdu thing a bit of a stretch to talk about.

fay 15: Gef/Moone Reunion & heist planning

 I started filling in the gaps today of the first chapter, finding the ways I wanted to phrase things, that I hadn't managed to find before. It's just scattered words, and wouldn't make much sense to post up here. Getting to the action scene, though, research had revealed that the magic wouldn't work the way I'd set it up, which would mean the whole action scene would need a complete overhaul? I explain more over at my other blog. Instead, I started the bits leading up to the caper. I only had time to do 667 original words, which is 1,000 under on a good day, but I need to do some planning now. Once again, words from last year are italicized, included for context.

NaNoWriMo day 14- Moone flashbacks

13,844, I think, after today's word count. That's almost 9,500 words behind. Which means I need to write about 600 more words a day to make sure I've got a full wordcount by the end (this is rounding up twice, of course.) I actually plan on doing twice that (rounding up yet again); something about the prospect of doing 3,000 words a day is like, yeah okay I can live with that and be rad. I didn't get that many today, of course; I'm 500 under (rounding yadda yadda,) and I'm very very tired after writing all this, but, eh, that's the idea isn't it, to force comfort zones, or whatever.

And besides, if I fail this stretch, I'll still have gotten the actual NaNoWriMo official word count by a long shot.

Day 12- Mostly NOC list stuff

I really need to set this blog in something other than what I've got it. Courier is a great typeface and all, but reading it, at least with this line length and leading, is just a pain. Something needs to change. And this gray background, yeesh! All would be made better larger, I think. Let's try that now and see.

So I'm not sure how cohesive any of the sentences are in today's writing; it's my first day using this tool called Write or Die, and it really does help with word count which is what matters at this stage, but I didn't really edit myself much, so there are a couple of repetitive parts, though I managed to minimize/make non-redundant, most of it.

Nanowrimo day 11 pt 2: The Reynard Cycle

Alright so I've basically figured that Pontifex is Isengrim from the Reynard Cycle, but I'm not sure when to drop that information or just sort of imply it. The Isengrim thing works for two reasons: 1 he's a wolf, 2 he's a priest. And I'd set him up as a trickster type or something, to justify his hot/cold relationship toward Moone and to give him something potentially nasty to do to Moone since he's the only one capable of being pulled in by Moone's tides; Isengrim being the nemesis of a trickster figure kinda deconstructs that in a neat little way and gives the character a lot of crunch.

I still need to write any scenes where Pontifex does anything remotely trickstery

Day 11- "That's Not How Werewolves Work" context

Had this part plotted out since last year, but didn't actually put it up because GAAYYY, only implying subtly that stuff in the first draft. I'm not sure this convo does go during the hurricane, because a lot of the exposition fits better before meeting Unwin. Losing a friend, his powers not having control over that, makes the Unwin threatening Pontifex thing sink in more, and Unwin straight-up calls Pontifex Moone's boyfriend and Moone being rendered uncomfortable by that wouldn't make sense unless those feelings are already there. But this part as initially planned slots quite neatly into day 13 of last year, here. Replacing, "[Moone brings up old werewolf friend, continuing to skirt around the issue, mentions full moon or something.]" I've included a few sentences to sandwich as context nonetheless.