NaNoWriMo Update #1 - The Pale Horse
Not a whole lot to say in this first post, honestly, mostly just announcing that for the first time in my life I’ll be participating in National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo), something I’ve wanted to do for the better part of a decade but never actually got around to (usually due to a combination of fear, laziness, and being busy). The goal is to write a chapter a day so I can knock out most (if not all) of the planned 31 Chapters of the final part of Locke’s journey.
To help speed along this process I did something else I’ve never done before: plan out the dang novel. I wrote The Long Road by the seat of my pants. Sure, I had a vague idea as to what I wanted to accomplish, but I was figuring out each story beat as I wrote them down. The Minute Men was a little more organized, but honestly not by much. This time I actually have a sense of the beginning, middle, and end of the novel. There will be some surprises along the way, but I’m hoping that having a plan will allow me to write faster and more efficiently.
I will endeavor to post updates once a week with my progress, possibly sharing some excerpts. Hell, I’ll share one now:
He kept his eyes closed, letting the rest of his senses take in the world around him. The crashing of the waves – at the same time so immediate and yet as far away as possible – echoed in his ears. The fresh smell of salt mixed with the ever-present lingering scent of rot danced in his nostrils. The man’s feet had long since gone numb in the icy waters of his coastal home, as they had a thousand times before.
He imagined the world on the other side of his eyelids – a trackless iron sea and a world saturated in gray. The sky, the sea, the clouds, and even the earth and trees would hold an ashen pallor, as if God had used up all his paints on other parts of the world. It had been a depressing world, made all the worse by roving bands of raiders and diseases such as the Wasting, which claimed the lives of three out of every four children.
A splash of ocean spray peppered his face, prompting the man to open his eyes. It was sand, not saltwater, and he was in the desert a thousand miles away from his homeland of Potomac. Instead of an ocean there was a sea of sand sprawling out behind and to the sides. Before him was a winding canyon, into which Shem Jenkins, the least fortunate of the Jenkins brothers, fled.
The pistol jumped in his hands and Shem in the dirt, the dirt, the dry earth thirstily drinking the man’s lifeblood. The dying man clawed at the ground as the gunslinger stepped over him, as if he were trying to climb or perhaps dig his own grave. No matter, he’d be given a proper burial soon enough.
Further along in the narrow canyon Ham Jenkins spun around and fired his six-shooter, the rapport of his gun cracking in time with the second shot of the gunslinger’s pistol. A line of searing hit ran along the left side of the gunslinger’s neck as Ham Jenkins stumbled and fell backwards to the ground, his life ended less than twenty feet from his brother’s corpse.
The gunslinger paused and tore away a strip of his poncho and tied it against the wound on his neck to staunch the bleeding. It was shallow. Superficial. He would live, which was more than Ham or Shem could say.
I’m very much looking forward to writing what I imagine will be the final chapter in Locke’s story. He’s been traveling with me for over ten years and the man deserves some rest!
