One down, 29 to go

Yesterday was Day One of NaNoWriMo month. I've been looking forward to it since deciding to take the challenge on October 2. Spent the month of October planning and plotting, and yesterday was the first opportunity to actually do some writing!

And I am stoked, let me tell you! Chapter One is written and I'm anxious to get on to Chapter Two today. Day One was a busy day. Between doing the first draft of the bi-weekly newspaper I build, plus sundry other little jobs that came up during the day, I had started to worry that I'd be forcing myself to sit down and write chapter one late in the evening, pooped and drained (forgive the imagery) after having already spent too many hours in front of the computer.

But around 4:30 things quieted down and I figured it was as good a time as any to get started. I assumed I'd have to stop frequently to work on something else, but the email didn't beep at me and I was able to work for about four hours without interruption. Incidentally, the fact that it took me four hours to write 1,916 words is a bit troubling. I'd assumed 90 minutes to two hours for that kind of output. But I did read over it several times and clean it up a lot, which is what extended the output time. I'll have to get that under control. I simply won't be able to devote four hours a day to writing this month.

From having only a nebulous idea of what the opening chapter would be about, I wound up with a really solid alien civilization (which I promptly destroyed). Even as I wrote, I was thinking to myself "where is this coming from? Who are these characters I'd never even conceived of until this very moment?" I hadn't even planned to HAVE characters in this chapter, let alone ones with names and nictitating eyelids, who lived in a four-caste class system made up of religious, science, enforcement and common classes named after the four elements. Where did that COME from??

I almost hated killing them all off!

Oh, but it was spectacular! Having discarded the idea of a supernova destroying their planet, I settled on a "planet-killer" asteroid hitting Endemeron and destroying every trace of life. The asteroid idea worked better than a supernova because of the time frame involved. While a supernova might destroy a planet within eight minutes of occurring (according to my friend the space geek), it can actually take hundreds of thousands of years before the final event. A huge asteroid, on the other hand, can be seen coming, has no physical impact until its arrival (pardon the pun), and its arrival time can be calculated fairly accurately...within a space of months in this case ...leaving enough time for the locals to come up with a way to save themselves (or at least their genes) from complete annihilation.

So, now we have thousands of pods floating randomly through space for half a million years, each one loaded with a living soup of DNA-laden Endemen virus. Where one particular pod winds up and what it does when it gets there is the rest of the story!