Dreamons and Sandboxes

In my post last week, I mentioned that I'm sort of writing a book for NaNoWriMo. This week, I thought I'd tell you a little bit about how it came to be, and how it's going right now.

It was a Sunday. I'd been getting up really early all week, so I was whacked. At around 11 in the afternoon, I gave in to temptation and went to bed for a nap.

Long story short, I had a nightmare (or should that be a DAY-mare, since it wasn't actually night?).

I dreamed that I was being chased by a scary old woman, who was wearing a pink cardigan (I'm not actually scared of old ladies in pink cardigans, but such is the nature of dreams). She said that she was a demon, and if she touched me, my soul would be destroyed. The only way I could escape from her was to wake up.

The only problem was, I couldn't. Every time I tried to open my eyes, they'd just slam shut again. So I had to wait until my brain decided that it was time to wake up. And in the meantime, I had to outrun the demon.

I did eventually wake up without being touched (whew!). But I couldn't stop thinking about the dream. That afternoon, I decided to write a story about a demon whom you  could only escape from by waking up. So I picked out a nice notebook and a pencil, and started scribbling.

And thus, The Dreamon was born.

This was in October. So, a month later, where am I at?

The notebooks in which I compose The Dreamon

Well, since I'm writing it by hand, I don't know exactly how many words I've written. But I think it's somewhere in the region of 20,000, which is rather annoying, since I feel like I'm almost done with the first draft. 20,000 words, in case you don't know, is hopelessly tiny for a novel, even a YA novel.

But there's something that annoys me even more than the low word count, and that is the fact that, right now, The Dreamon stinks.

I'm not kidding. It absolutely stinks. It stinks worse than a rotting kipper and Gorgonzola sandwich. It's really that bad. The characters are underdeveloped, the plot is full of holes, some of the descriptions don't even make sense, and the dialogue ... oh, don't get me started on the dialogue.

But you know what? That's all OK. Because, to quote Shannon Hale, "I'm simply shoveling sand into a box so that later I can build castles". I just need to get the story down on paper, and then later I can start worrying about things like word count and making my writing halfway decent.

Besides, since I'm not actually doing NaNoWriMo per se, I can ignore the 50,000 word count target (hee hee hee!).