NaNo: Day Nineteen

My novel is out of control. And I think it's nobody's fault but my own.

When I started, I had a beginning, and a direction for about the next 20 pages. And I had a pretty good -- to abou 75% or so -- idea of what the ending was going to be.

Middle? I dunno. We'll figure it out when we get there.

Those first 20 pages? Well, the initial idea was that those would be the backstory, setting up the character and his history and explaining a bit about how he got to be where he was today. After those 20 pages, we could dig into the real meat of the story.

I'm at page 55 and still working on backstory. At some story "backstory" became "story". Or at least the first half of the "story".

I've got about a chapter and half until that first half is finished, I think, if everything goes more or less the way it seems to be. That'll be, based on previous chapters, somewhere between 15 to 30 pages, putting the first half of the book somewhere in the area of 70 to 85 pages and 40,000 to 50,000 words. Not too shabby.

Except I'm just as confused right now about the second half as I was regarding the first half 30 or 40 pages ago.

I have a rough idea of what's going to happen, but that's mostly because I know the ending that I'm headed towards. Page by page, sentence by sentence, I haven't the foggiest idea what I'm going to do with the second half of my book.

Nothing worth worrying about right now, though, I guess. I've still got the first half to finish. And if all goes well, that'll get me to my 50,000 words for NaNo, leaving me to worry about the second half in December.