Another week, another signing, another interview

It was a good signing/meet and greet at Sun Meadow yesterday. Not that I sold a lot of books, but I talked to a lot of people and met several new friends. And, yes, Skin to the Wind means exactly what it sounds like.

It was a good week and I’ve gotten a lot of writing done. I’m participating in Camp NaNoWriMo this month for the seventh time since it was founded. I’m closing in on completion of the project I planned for this month and am writing a second project at the same time. This week, I wrote 16,000 words.

That’s pretty average these days. Over the course of this year, I’ve averaged 2,050 words a day. Yes, that is more than the equivalent of a NaNo every month.

My writing cabin is very active this year with eighteen of us making progress on our goals. One, a new friend from Bulgaria, asked the age-old NaNoWriMo question, “Are you a pantser or a plotter?” That inspired me to post the second part of my FirstExit Interview.

FirstExit: There is a long-standing division among participants in National Novel Writing Month, or NaNoWriMo, regarding whether people spend time plotting out their novel before they start writing or simply write by the seat of their pants. It’s known as ‘plotter vs. pantser’. Nathan, are you a plotter or a pantser?

Nathan: Yes.

FirstExit: That was supposed to be an open-ended question to engage you in a discussion about the differences.

Nathan: Well, the truth is that at different times I’m both with a lot of shades of gray between. My first NaNoWriMo was completely by the seat of my pants. In fact, I blogged it daily as I developed it. I’d been working on developing websites and created a little town I called Willow Mills, Indiana just so I could put some content on my sample site. When I found out about NaNoWriMo, I just started writing stories set in this mythical town on the Eel River and hung them all together with a loose storyline about what really happened to Albert Bailey’s Prize Bull? Each time the subject came up, I’d say, “But that’s another story.” Finally, there was the day that I had to deal with whatever happened to this bull and it pulled in all the characters and storylines I’d developed in the snippets about the city. It really wasn’t a traditional novel and when I went to validate my words about two hours before midnight, I discovered I was about a thousand words short. I had the newspaper editor interview all the characters for a few words about what they expected in the new millennium. I just barely made 50k. The next year wasn’t much better, but I had a general idea of who the characters were going to be and how the story would go. Accidental Witness wasn’t bad, but I kept discovering how much I had to make up in order to fill the word count for the day.

FirstExit: And that brings us to For Blood or Money.

Nathan: Yes, though the original title I envisioned was Security and Exchange. When I first made that public, though, people thought it was about Microsoft email servers.

FirstExit: But you plotted For Blood or Money pretty carefully.

Nathan: Yes. I spent about two months before NaNoWriMo developing characters and storylines. The story was to take place during the literal thirty days of November 2006 and I intended to blog it daily. I guess by this time, I was really into the serialization of my novels—something that I still do.

FirstExit: I remember some software you showed during one of our write-ins that year that looked like a corkboard with sticky notes on it.

Nathan: Like many things, I’ve lost track of that software and don’t even remember its name any longer. But what you saw was exactly the kind of tool that I still use. I created a calendar or timeline at the top of the board. I had a line beneath it that indicated what the major plot points would be on each day of the story. And another line that had action scenes. Those were two different colors. The story had half a dozen principal characters, so I had a line of cards for each of them indicating what they would do that day. Since the other characters came in and out of the story, I created timelines for each of them with where they were and anything that would affect why they entered the story at a particular point or disappeared at a point. It was pretty complex, but what a breeze it was to write that story!

FirstExit: It sounds like you had it all written before you started.

Nathan: No actual words that would go in the story were on my electronic notecards. But following them really made it easy to know the characters better than I’d ever managed before. I’d even decided where the sequel would go and that it would be narrated by a young woman. For a month before I started writing, I posted a blog on one of the popular sites from the perspective of the young woman who was my detectives assistant.

FirstExit: You impersonated a young woman. How do you look in drag?

Nathan: Not great. What was amazing, though, was that she became ‘friends’ with a few dozen young women who followed her every day and gave her advice regarding what was happening in her life. Before you ask, I didn’t try to deceive anyone. I put a pinned post at the top of the blog disclosing that I was a middle-age man exploring the character and voice for a young woman who would narrate a story. But the fans really got into it.

FirstExit: Did you write the sequel?

Nathan: Yes. As soon as the last post of November went up on Security and Exchange, Deb Riley began her narration of Municipal Blondes on December 1. And even though I’ve not formally published that story, Riley’s fans really got into her. Around the holiday, I missed a few days posting to her blog. Then I got a message from one of her fans that said, “Deb, I’m so worried about you! I don’t trust that guy who just saved you. Please write and let us know you are okay.” It was like she was a best friend that had lost touch. I had to get right back to work.

FirstExit: Do you continue to plot out all your books now?

Nathan: No. Certainly not to the same degree. When I wrote Steven George & The Dragon, I had only the idea that an inept dragonslayer would be sent out to slay the dragon, not know where the dragon lived, what it looked like, or how to kill it. But he would encounter people and they would exchange Once-upon-a-time stories that would each lead him a step closer to the dragon. But I had no idea who the people were that he’d meet nor what the stories would be. On the other hand, I treat mysteries and literary fiction with a great deal of forethought. In one way or another, I’d researched The Gutenberg Rubric for twenty years and had compiled a large notebook of background notes before I started writing.

FirstExit: Was that a NaNoWriMo book?

Nathan: Not originally. I’d spent so much time researching and planning that book that I started on January 1 and determined that I would carefully craft the story and each sentence. By the end of July or early August, I had 40,000 words and hated every one of them. I sent them off to my editor, Jason Black, and pled with him to tell me what was wrong. I think he wrote back almost as many words as I had in the story, telling me in great detail what was wrong. I put the story in a drawer and did some more research, then pulled it out on November 1 and started over. I wrote the 80,000-word story in the month of November and started revisions that eventually won it an award.

FirstExit: And then there was City Limits. You planned.

Nathan: An incredible amount. I spent most of September and October making color coded index cards—about 500 of them. They contained what I thought would be the major action or title of each chapter, a card for each character that would be introduced and many of their family, cards for actions, places, businesses, conflicts… you name it.

FirstExit: And a bulletin board.

Nathan: I started writing on November 1, 2017 by going through all the cards and arranging them on my cork board to indicate what I thought the major plot points would be, where they would be executed, and who would be involved. Then I put up cards to remind myself of the descriptions of people, places, things, sights, smells, sounds, and anything else I’d thought of. When I had the board in front of me, I started writing. The words flowed easily for about the first fifty thousand. Then I discovered that my characters had driven things in a different direction. The person who was supposed to die, didn’t. The hero was constantly in jail or the hospital. I found fewer and fewer of my 500 planning cards on the bulletin board with each chapter I started.

FirstExit: You finished the story, though. All ready for publication?

Nathan: City Limits was the longest single story I completed during NaNoWriMo at a little over 128,000 words. When I started, I estimated that I would need to do an 80% rewrite afterward. I had four superb editors who commented on every chapter as they were being written. As a result, I upped my estimate to 90%!

FirstExit: We’ll be back with another fascinating interview with the author at another time. Surely, this is as much as anyone can bear at once! See more about Nathan Everett and the books mentioned above at http://www.nathaneverett.com.