(no subject)

A week into nano and I broke 20k words. My monthly average is about 30k so... wow.

What started as cute and quirky fairy tale has slipped back into my slightly more regular narrative voice and the story's picked up some serious darkness as it snowballs along. I ran with my "add fairies" idea--I mean, the original story has fairies but I'm talking more than helpful angelic figures who offer advice. Remember, I did absolutely zero planning when I went into this, my only thoughts were: I need more sibling interaction out of Wild Swans stories, and I need someone to punch that king in the face.

I am not at the king-punching. 20,000 words in and they're only just crossing the sea. And I started the story with Adora reuniting with her brothers so that's twenty thousand words of sibling interaction (well nobody gives me what I want quite like I do).

Silly as the story is, it's kind of hard to keep it light--the brothers turn into swans, sister run out of her house by a sorceress, and she needs to figure out what the eff to do. There's time before the sister finds out how to break the spell (which some retellings don't use) but I found it instructive: what do a bunch of driven people do when they have no direction? I can see why a lot of these stories push the brothers out of the narrative or limit their time as human because they have a lot of capacity for getting shit done, which is something I find deliciously painful because boy does "no direction in my life" speak to me.

I also have some problems:

1) Adora loved her mother and sees her father as a stern disciplinarian, when mostly dad was trying to protect his kids from the whirlwind of weirdness that was their mother (dude had the bad luck to marry not one but two fairy women), and I learned pretty quickly that I needed to add some PoVs from the brothers' because that's the best way to reveal the complexity

2) ...Complexity? Didn't I go into this all "yeah, 50,000 words, in, out, done. I just want to do these few conceits...."

3) Why can't I stop writing backstory vignettes like tiny Nicolas meeting the Wild Hunt and tiny Adora being 100% done with all her annoying brothers and Luciano realizing at age 6 that he doesn't want to be king he can't even handle ruling over siblings (one of these things is not like the others, one of these things had a traumatizing childhood~)

3) I know how it ends and oh god I just want to write adorable post-ending stories forever send help

I don't usually do nano. Either it was during finals or I reached a point in my life where I realized I was putting out a regular word count and didn't need the stress, but I've been lagging on my word counts, I feel, so this is a good boost. I regularly hit 1,000 words a day, but given that sometimes I spend all day writing, hitting 1,000 is frustrating when I know that I can do it over my lunch break (and frequently do). Am I doomed to only write 1,000 words, to write over an hour or two no matter how long I give myself? Well maybe. I've hit 3k and 4k but I mostly write from 1 or 2 until about 4 and call it a day. Even with one day where I only wrote 700 words I've pretty much doubled my normal output, so go me.