For NaNoWriMo 2018 I wrote a murder mystery set on a starliner. With
all the freewriting and deleted words stripped away, it turned out to
be a little over 22k words, a novelette by SFWA
standards. Its main contribution to my development as a writer
was that it contained a complete albeit sketchy plot – my first
NaNo project I could consider finished in some reasonable sense. For
this month’s Camp NaNoWriMo I intended to start turning it into a
full novel, but I didn’t have enough prep time to do all the
planning my research on writing
mysteries
showed was necessary. So I’ve been slogging through more research,
world-building, plot outlining, figuring out what the various
antagonists are doing – all of which is reasonably fun, but over
the weekend I got frustrated with not having actually started the
story. So I drafted the first chapter.
The story
just didn’t work.
