I just hit the fifty thousand word mark on my manuscript. According to NaNoWriMo, that makes me a winner. So, what does a winner do? He stays at the keyboard to update his blog. Awesome. What else?

He starts organizing those words. This manuscript didn’t play nice, not like Empty Hallways did. Empty Hallways was a beautifully linear story where I had a general sense of the world I was stepping into, and which direction everything was going to flow.

This one, which I christened with the working title House of Thirteen, is a fiasco.

For starters, there is no thirteen. It’s four. At least for now. I wrote it in sections. It’s written like “Chapter 4, now Chapter 26, 27, 28, Chapter … 12? Ish? Chapter 1 – no, wait! Prologue! Hrm, what about an ending?” The whole document is full of broken, shifting sections, some of which are going to have to be completely revised because of plot developments that came out of writing further along in the story… which may have actually been earlier on the timeline…

This is why I don’t do science fiction. Writing supernatural fiction is hard enough without all the rules. But it’s a wonderful story. Now that the characters are all playing nice, I’m looking forward to filling in all of the pieces and turning this into, what I hope, will be the start of a long and fulfilling saga.

Currently, what I can tell you is this:

House of 13 (or whatever I’m going to call it now) is the story of a girl named Ren; an average young woman trying to cut a path in life to suit her desires. But in one clumsy move, her whole world is turned upside down and she is plunged into a life of risk, reward and experiences she never dreamed possible. Can she leave her ordinary world behind and step through the veil into the extraordinary?

Spoiler: She does, and what she finds is an adventure I am hoping to share with the world sometime in 2014.

Happy NaNoWriMo to everyone still writing – and good luck. You still have plenty of time to get that word count up!

To those who have finished before me: you’ve earned a rest, but don’t say it’s over. You’ve still got work ahead of you to finish that novel! You can do it (in December… or January)!

I have to get back to wrangling an unruly manuscript now.