Vampires, Zombies, Werewolves

My NaNoWriMo novel for 2008.

read it!

UNFORTUNATELY, I am not going to win NaNoWriMo this year.  I’m a little over 27,000 words as of this writing (Nov 26th) and I don’t think I can bust out 20,000 words in four days.  I will post my final wordcount on Dec 1st.

HOWEVER, this does not mean that I will stop writing VZW.  I enjoy writing it and will dedicate time for it, and release chapters every couple of weeks or so, hopefully.  So DON’T think that it’s over, cause it’s not!

kthxbai!

Here are specific chapters:

chapter one
chapter two
chapter three
chapter four
chapter five
chapter six
chapter seven
chapter eight
chapter nine 

NANO HISTORY

I’ve been doing NaNoWriMo since 2002, which I couldn’t believe until I started compiling a list of my previous projects, all of which have failed.  The only one that came close was Timekeeper Part II (2007), but it still only got 18,000 words.  Here is a brief rundown of all of my old NaNo novels.

2002: The Holy War (10,793 words)

The Holy War was a story entrenched in an extensive world that I had created, which was all bundled under the name “The Universe Saga.”  It was basically a compendium of events from the beginning of the Multiverse to the beginning of the Universe, up until the end of mankind and the eventual breakdown of the Multiverse into a single giant Universe.

Yeah, I know, sounds confusing.  I tried to write about about 20 billion years of history, past, present and future.  I still have some good stories out of it, the most successful (I think) being The Mediocre Adventures of Mike, which I don’t have linked anywhere anymore because I don’t.  Awakenings, the first serialized novel I ever wrote in the forums of Zealot Trivia way back in the late 1990s, also falls into the Universe Saga.  It’s that extensive.

The Holy War is set in the future and is about a boy who is the second coming of Christ.  But Christ isn’t the son of God, he’s a man from another planet who was attempting to get everyone on Earth to convert to his planet’s religion (which is called Divinity).

Yeah, you can see why I gave up on that one.

2003: Yuso Adoenis and the Key to Everywhere (966 words)

I’m honestly not sure if this really is my NaNo novel, but the file says it was modified in November of 2003 so I can only assume it is.  This is another novel set within the Universe Saga, based in the Zealot Galaxy.  I could explain to you what that all means but I’d rather not.  It was supposed to be about Yuso, a smuggler, and his crew as they go up against a bad guy named Uldarte.  Uldarte gains power the happier he is.  Previous to the story he was locked up in a prison and pumped full of drugs that made him sad, so he was powerless.

Big ideas, absolutely no time to get them done.

2004: Harold’s Last Straw (2,830 words)

I had just finished reading One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and so I had this great idea about writing a story in first person, in the kind of colloquial vernacular that Kesey uses in Cuckoo.  This story was about a guy, Harold, who was cryogenically frozen because he was about to die and they thought they could fix him in the future.  Well he is unfrozen in the future, fixed up, and he was supposed to meet this guy named Harold who has all these opinions and is kind of crazy, but in a fun, adventurous way.  I remember having a dream which made me think of this story idea.  I don’t remember what the dream was anymore.

I kinda wish I had continued working on this one.  It could’ve been a lot of fun.

2005: The Merach Quiann (1,045 words)

I won’t lie.  This idea was totally ripped off from Shadow of the Colossus, a very excellent PS2 game where you try to kill giant things.  Unfortunately my idea made a better screenplay (that is, it worked out great in my head) than a novel.  It’s about a young boy who lives in a village, and one day the village explodes because a giant creature crawls out of the earth.  Everyone in the village is killed except him, and he’s devastated until a man on horseback comes and picks him up.  The man claims that the boy must go kill the monster, and they rush off to do the deed.  And then some more stuff happens.

It was supposed to be one of those “coming of age mentory” stories but I just didn’t have the energy to put it on paper.

2006: Oliver Treadwell (7,620 words)

Oliver Treadwell is a intergalactic detective who is given the task of finding out why the Universe is becoming “moldy.”  It was supposed to be a Hitchhiker’s Guide type of adventure comedy.  Oh, hey, I wrote a premise out!  Let’s read it:

Premise: A man is given the task of stopping the universe from becoming “moldy.”  The mold is going to come from Earth, as the inhabitants there are much too sedentary.  He can’t get them to do anything until he is visited by an ambassador of a race of aliens who wish to enslave Earth.  He let’s them go down because at least then the Earthlings are doing something.  However, during all this he becomes enamored with an Earth girl and tries to get her out when the aliens come.  He makes a deal with the aliens to let her go, but she wants to bring her family, etc.  The aliens refuse and she is enslaved.  So in trying to get her to escape Oliver becomes the head of a group of rebels trying to get rid of the alien enslavers. 

So there you go.  I think I just ran out of time on this one.

2007: Timekeeper, Part II (18,408 words)

My biggest success, at least in word count.  Timekeeper is about a world where certain crystals control the ebb and flow of time.  Mankind has found these crystals and now lives in both space and time.  Meaning that you can pick out a house in New York, and you can choose if you want to live in 19th century NY, 18th century NY, etc etc.  It’s a cool premise, and I had written out the first part a while ago and was aching to write the second half, so I figured I’d give it a shot during NaNoWriMo.

Only problem is, the first part is already under 50,000 words (it’s like 30,000ish).  So as I started writing I realized that if I wanted the two parts to be equal in length, I’d have to cut it short and now beat the 50,000 word mark.  This, coupled with school and other things, forced me to stop writing.  Plus the narrative got a little confusing, too.

And those are my previous NaNoWriMo attempts.  Here’s hoping I finally win one this year!