Time's children: Evil Tentacle Beasts from Under the Sea

More Sue than you can shake a stick at

This is my nanowrimo novel page. It's a loose sequel to the novel I wrote last year. But this one has to be better, damn it. I'm aiming to actually finish the story (and not just skim along in a panic on the last two days to an abrupt sketchy ending at 50K words.)

That's what I said last year and that's what I'm saying this year. But I mean it this time! Since I can't keep focused for much more than a month at a time, this year my story will probably be shorter (in order to be more or less finished in November).

I didn't kill everyone off last time, so I'm using them again. Yay.

Word count: 36155

24-Nov-2007
Now even more behind. Joy!
17-Nov-2007
Saturday. I'm officially behind. Bah. I am seized by the irrational impulse to sit here in front of the computer waiting for the perfect sentence to write itself for me. And then the next one after that. Every year I forget that it's me that has to do the writing. *cries*. Bogged down plotwise. I made up a couple of new characters to be the bridge to the next section.
12-Nov-2007
Here we are in the middle of week 2. Theoretically, should have 20K words today. I wanted to have 24K, but doesn't seem likely at this point. Story? Plot? Characters? Huh. Annoyingly, I'm "discovering" new background information as I go along. If I ever revise the damn thing, I'll have to know everything from the start.
1-Nov-2007
...and we're off to a slug's start. Kids are hyped on Halloween candy. There's no school today. I went to bed late and am now having trouble concentrating. I'm not sure whether concentration is a plus in this case. If I could concentrate, I might be concentrating on my distractions. 100 words. 500. 700. YAWN. 1000. 2000. I didn't reach the point I had intended tonight. Another scene came in between. That's all right. More words.
26-Oct-2007 - postscript
On second thought, thought "1" below can't be right. Contradicts the tradition of fey being long-lived, etc. etc. I was thinking they could be opportunistic colonizers of lands that had been magically devastated (able to fill it up within a few years) and not above creating magical devastations themselves...but not the ones in this story. Doesn't fit the rest of the plot, such as it is.
26-Oct-2007
Less than a week before it starts. Panic! Random thoughts of the day:

1) Fey (unlike humans and elves) are an r-selected weedy race. Each of them has thousands if not millions of offspring (most never make it to adulthood). How did they get this way? I think a magical virus started it (a Curse or a Song), infecting magically charged humans and changing them, way back when. Once it happened, the survivors are resistant to further infections of that exact nature.

2) If humans and fey have magic, so do the other lifeforms. No "Only humans can do X!" nonsense. The magic manifests differently, of course, but animals (or plants) would use the magic for the same sort of stuff they use anything else.

3) The list of political systems in wikipedia was amusing to read. Did my fey randomly decide to play Romans for a few centuries?

11-Oct-2007
Ha ha! I'm totally psyched. That's because I haven't started writing the bloody thing yet.