NaNoWriMo: After November

Ray: Everybody can relax, I found the car! Needs some suspension work; and shocks, and brakes, brake pads, lining, steering box, transmission, rear end -
Peter: How much?
Ray: Only forty-eight hundred. And maybe new rings, also mufflers, a little wiring...  

"Ghostbusters", 1984

My NaNoWriMo novel did reach fifty thousand words, but it's not so much, you know, done. It needs some more characters, plot, last names, some transition scenes, an ending, little touches like that. And that's before the rewrite, which is before the first round of editing, all of which comes before I'll be willing to call it a first draft.

I'm not ready for that yet; I think it needs to cook some more. In fact, it may need to cook until next year, when I could start writing it all over again, this time with an outline. It served its purpose as a writing exercise, and I'm going to leave the words behind for now, while I chew over the concept in my head.

But the writing thing, I enjoyed that. I'd like to keep it up. So what to write now?

I've considered short stories - really, because it seems more plausible that I could finish one. But a short story seems, in many ways, to be a more difficult form than a novel. They're, well, short, which means that they need to know where they're going and what they're doing, and waste not a word on the irrelevant. And do all that while maintaining the illusion of not doing it. And I'm not good at that. I could finish a very bad short story faster than a moderately bad novel, but can I ever finish a good short story? I have my doubts.

And I've considered just writing random vignettes, and analyzing them for writing flaws. But, meh. I just did fifty thousand words of writing that wasn't sure where it was going. Do I want to do more?

There is, of course, writing on my blogs. That is writing, but I'm talking about fiction writing.

Come to think of it, I could put fiction writing on the blog. That would be a new frontier - letting someone read even one word of my fiction. It's actually an interesting thought, if I could think of a format that might work.

Blog fiction. Hmmm. I'll be thinking that over.

Photo: By Christopher Ziemnowicz. Wikimedia Commons.