There were days where the words flowed out easily, days where each word was a struggle, and then there were days where no words were typed at all. The last one happened way too much in the early part of November, but I ended up pushing through and coming back.

That’s right, I finished NaNo this year.

A lot of the time I didn’t have any idea on where the plot was going, but I was able to have a lot of fun with character development. The funny thing to me was finally experiencing what many writers have spoken about; their characters doing things that weren’t expected. I never understood that before. I mean, I created them. I am writing their background, their personality, what they say, and so on, so why would they do something that wasn’t what I wanted? How it happened to me was when I would be writing out a scene that I had planned in my head. Nothing too detailed, just a basic idea of what I wanted the characters to do. But the character didn’t end up doing that. She ended up doing something different as I was writing out her actions. Even though I was the one driving her personality, she ended up having control over what she would do or wouldn’t do. I have to admit, it was kind of cool and interesting to experience.

So I’ll bet you’re curious what my story was about. I started with an idea that I saw over at i09. They were listing some creatures that deserved a shot at big success, like what vampires and werewolves are currently having. This one stuck out with me, especially the part I bolded.

Lich

Where you’ve see it: Dungeons & Dragons, World of Warcraft, The Elder Scrolls, Final Fantasy.

What it is: Sort of like zombies with brains (and not the eating kind), liches are undead creatures who retain their intellect but whose bodies keep on rotting. They’ve generally chosen this way of non-life as a sort of perverse immortality.

Why it deserves a shot at the big time: Liches have been a staple of high fantasy, and it’s time to drag them into the modern era. Egomaniacal scholars, wizards, and business men could all seek to preserve their consciousness for future generations, with terrifying (and fairly gross) results. There’s a definite supervillainous quality to liches; they may not jump out and shout “boo,” but they’re likely to have a horde of horrifying minions. And when you finally see their faces, liches can be pretty frightening themselves.

I ended up with a hodge podge of Mass Effect, Event Horizon, Dead Space inspired space horror, where rich clients could preserve their mind as a Lich. It had a huge corporation behind the technology that made it possible, and the same corporation provided a planet in their privately owned system where the Lich could develop their powers, intellect, or whatever else they wanted. My heroine was a bad ass soldier who was infiltrating the elite security forces to investigate what was going on, since the corporation was hiding the Lich and their technology from the government.

My story had everything. Action! Conspiracies! Rotting, powerful, immortal creatures! Violence! Sex!

They only thing is that I didn’t finish the story. While I did hit the 50K mark, the plot didn’t find an ending. I wasn’t sure how to tie it all together, so I just kept dragging out the characters doing stuff to get the count. I’d be interested to see how I could get it all together and finish it. I still think it’s an interesting story. What do you guys think?

And speaking of dragging out the word count, I admit to cheats. Oh the cheats! Like unnecessary chapter titles, or not using contractions, or using an ellipse to count as a word, or very detailed sex scenes. The worst cheat it did was have someone singing the ‘bottles of beer on the wall’ song for about a page of text. Except it wasn’t just a bottle of beer, it was a bottle of an alien drink that had two words in its name. It’s not a cheat I’m proud of, but when it comes to NaNo, sometimes you need something, anything, to bump up your word count for the day. Of course, it’s the cheats that are the first to go when editing.

Anyone else do well? Not do well? Or the most important question of all… Are we going to do it again next year?