Then, something happened. I just… stopped. So, now I’m thinking, if I don’t continue with THAT novel, I still have two weeks or so to reach the actual goal of 50,000 words in 30 days. After all, the first 2000 or so wasn’t intended to be part of a novel; it featured the characters from the novel I decided to continue, which made revisiting that world a little easier. Maybe I should scrap the idea of that story being a novel, and make it a collection of adventures with the same characters, like the annual Nick Dasher series I did from 2000-2012. There’s another group of characters I chose to do that with, like a collection of interwoven stories… like one of Ray Bradbury’s books.
I now think that the best way to move forward is by skipping the resolution to the main story ("the novel”), and taking some of the other ideas in different directions. The book, entitled Moonlit, was supposed to have every paranormal/fantasy creature I know of in one big story… but the big story isn’t working out. If I take vignettes that were supposed to be in that big story and make them novellas that can stand alone, I guess I could shrink the breadth of what I’d intended to be "the novel," and make a novella out of it that leads to the other stories. After all, what turned into the first chapter of the novel originally started out as a simple short story. Maybe that’s all it was supposed to be, just one story to introduce these characters, to be used in more short stories.
I think I’ll take that original story, plus the one I wrote on the first of this month, and break up “the novel” into other shorts. That, or find a way to give each chapter a beginning, middle, and end. That’s an even better idea… I think I’ll go try to do that, and maybe add to my word count in the process. More later…