It is almost fitting: for my 450th All This Useless Beauty entry, I start NaNoWriMo anew.
         Considering how underdeveloped the idea is, it's going well so far. Chapter One, finished, comes in at 3461 words. That's long, really long for a YA chapter, but I can already see what I'll cut and move elsewhere. I'm just not doing it right now. Because that's NaNo, people. Writing in chapter one a bunch of filler that you'll move elsewhere but you need to get it out, vomit it onto the page, so that you don't forget.
         I remember writing Recommend Me a few years back: I made extensive notes, with index cards for the various events and characters. I had a stack of at least eighteen or twenty, and the night before NaNo, I commandeered the kitchen table and spread them all out, rearranging them again and again until it all fit together. I redid that several times over the course of the month, so sure I didn't want to miss anything. It worked for RM, but this novel -- I'm too embarrassed to include its stupid working title -- isn't that way. This is far from the distilled idea I had for RM. This is entirely seat-of-the-pants.
         Some people, I've heard, make big spreadsheets with all the information they want to include. Chapter by chapter, listed in order in Excel. This is sort of like the 21st century storyboard, connecting the dots and doing summations easily, so it can all be indexed later. I might need to do that in the rewrite of this novel: I need all the dates to match up. But for now, it can all just take place on generic June and July days.
         Onward, readers, to chapter two! Death before dishonor.