Bad Company: Finish It This Month!

I've started JanNoWriMo with a bang. Word wars, that is: I'm writing 10,000 words today, and writing the entire climactic scene of the trial sequence, the trial of Clayton Starr, Charlie and Desiree's persecutor and the head lawyer of Dictel. For my second word war, the first 10,000 words count toward the 30,000 I'm writing by the 5th. Why so many words so soon in a WriMo? Because I intend to finish the first complete draft of Bad Company this month!

Bad Company has always been incomplete. After every WriMo I wrote for it in, I left scores of plot holes, some of them humongous. I had many story ideas I never wrote. I've decided to write them all now.

The trial of Clayton Starr is the first of many plot holes I'm filling this month. Writing the unwritten scenes allows me to win a WriMo without cheating. I'm spending the first 5 days of JanNo writing as many unwritten scenes as I can so I can get the major word count job out of the way early and do some major rewriting till the last week of the month. I'll do all the rewrites starting the 6th; once I run out of chapters to rewrite, I'll go back to writing unwritten scenes and hit my word count target (I chose 50,000) and score my JanNoWriMo victory.

Meanwhile, I decided to do a simultaneous project that I think will help me with the novel. For a January challenge in the Script Frenzy, I announced that I would write the script for a BadCo movie adaptation. To this end, I'll be downloading the latest version of Celtx, a popular free scriptwriting program. (I hope Celtx has a comics template by now, or gets one by April.) Writing the novel and the script at the same time will help me put the long and complicated novel in better order.

Writing the "trial of Clayton Starr" chapter went a whole lot more smoothly than the rewrite of chapter 2, in which Desiree runs away to half-sister Ruby's apartment while Charlie is hiding out there. I didn't realize at first that Ruby would be a "mentor as threshold guardian" kind of character until I was in the middle of writing it. Chapters 1 and 2, therefore, will be the first chapters I'll rewrite once I've written my 30,000th word of new story.

I have my primary goal for January now. Soon I'll get Bad Company written, rewritten, finished, and ready for NaNoEdMo.

And now, back to writing...