Road Closed

The unfinished novel is my own, Road Closed (the title will almost certainly be changed to something else, should the novel ever be finished). The prologue outlines the tragic summer and drink-to-forget beginnings of young Christian Warren, setting the stage for the five-year jump ahead as the story begins proper.

But the rest of the book–which is currently sitting at around 70,000+ words, is a bit of a mess. And it’s not the mess where you can just keep writing, then go back and fix the messy bits later. It needs serious surgery. But I kind of want to try, because that prologue still delights me today.

In order to do this, I’ve pondered ways to make it happen:

• As much of a distraction-free environment as possible. I could write it in Linux, where I am far less likely to suddenly decide I need to play Diablo 3 again RIGHT NOW.
• Choosing software. I am probably going to avoid Ulysses going forward. It’s good, but Mac-only and I’m culling pretty much anything that has a subscription attached. Other alternatives:
  • Microsoft Word. Ew, no.
  • Scrivener. Maybe, but I would save files locally and only work in either Linux or Windows, not both.
  • noVelWriter. This is new, and is kind of a Scrivener-lite, but open source, free and a bit clunky, as one often expects of FOSS¹Free Open Source Software software.
  • The unnamed app the Scrivener team is releasing in 2025. It sounds like a pared-down Scrivener, which would delight me.
  • Obsidian. I’m not super-keen on this, though I did write the original draft of Road Closed with WriteMonkey, which uses the same minimalist Markdown aesthetic as Obsidian.
  • Something else I haven’t discovered yet.
• Writing out a revised version of the story before diving back in, so I have an actual path to follow. I can always veer from it later, but it’s still better than going into a dark room and bumping my knees on every piece of furniture.

I am in my Mulling and Pondering stage, also known as M&P. I will update if I move beyond this to Typing Actual Words.

I came to a final decision regarding National Novel Writing Month 2022: I won’t be taking part.

BUT! I have also decided to go ahead and revive my incomplete NaNoWriMo project, Road Closed. It currently stands at over 70,000 words, many of which will no doubt be excised from the final draft (not to be confused with the software of the same name. Not that it’s not totally confusing to use a common term as the name of your software).

Since I am not reviving this as an actual NaNoWriMo project, I’ll be working on it at my own pace, which is really for the best, anyway. There’s going to be a lot of revision, and NaNoWriMo is definitely not built around revising your work.

I’ll have more on this sometime soonish.

I’ve actually written two outlines, the first is based on the outline template mentioned in this post, and I quickly sketched in some ideas about where the story would go, providing it with an actual ending and other crazy things a reader might expect.

The next was an outline of what I’d actually written, 20+ chapters (the number is imprecise because some of the chapters are themselves only outlines and not actually written out). This is right now the more interesting of the two (to me) because it reflects the story as it currently is. The process of putting it all down has laid out how lumpy the story is.

By lumpy, I mean how the story sometimes has scenes that don’t really add much, or seem to build toward something, then peter out. It’s not a smooth ride. The classic three act format is classic because it works, and Road Closed currently does not follow this. There are foundations in place and some of it works pretty decently now. There is, I think, a progression of the deterioration of Christian. The harder he tries to pull things together, the more things unravel, with his drinking accelerating and leading to near-collisions while driving, episodes of vomiting, the DTs and an overnight stay at the hospital. But the concurrent idea (spoiler alert!) of him inevitably leading toward a spectacular car crash that wipes out a bunch of innocent bystanders–which the ghost of Simon obliquely warns him about–is only hinted at very late in the story as written, and I wonder if it even works now as a conclusion.

Also left unaddressed is the entire plot point of revealing Russell Stave as Wendy’s killer, allowing Wendy to find peace, which is a plot point specifically referenced by Christian and Kevin multiple times, so this should really be expanded upon, which means Russell needs more than a few brief cameos.

But now that I have the whole story laid out in front of me I can start yoinking scenes that don’t work and figure out what to fill in, then come up with a convincing third act that pulls it all together in a spellbinding package of spellbindery. Or something.

The next update I’ll report on how this has progressed.