Hey kids,
October is my favorite time of year, not just because I can put October Rust on repeat for thirty-one glorious days. I grew up far from the perpetual outdoor sauna that is east Texas. Back home, yes, I still think of it as such: the apple cider is crisp, and her lips are cold as I kiss them, but her tongue is warm. And just off the coast of the North Atlantic, the air is so clean you can smell the snow lurking just over the horizon like an ancient hateful god that only wants to shroud the world in silence. That looming makes every moment stolen in the low autumnal twilight of the forty-fifth parallel a treasure. Every couple of years here in the States, October also means the end of election season when even speaking to another human is like juggling lit dynamite. 2025 will be a welcome relief no matter who wins; I no longer care.
But none of that matters.
November is National Novel Writing Month. Though my burned-out heart says to take a year off, in true ADHD fashion, my disobedient brain decided we’re doing Nano since it’s only seventeen hundred words a day for a month so my heart should just shut up and deal. If we need a break, we can get high for the first quarter of 2025. The dummy doesn’t know yet, but we’re going to have to crap out a thousand words a day for the rest of our meatbag’s existence, so there are no breaks in the schedule. The only thing I can do is refill the coffee cup and keep on.
By my estimation, there are close to zero people who know the knucklehead behind Damon Kadam, but if they did, they would laugh at how I’m going to start talking about Nano Prep. I tore off my first attempt at Nano in seventeen days but haven’t been able to take off like that again since then, despite recreating most of the conditions that led to the speed. The lone condition I have never recreated is trying it with an outline. I’m three or four moves beyond that desk and computer, but I can get legal pads at any Dollar Tree. A simple store for a simple method of controlling ADHD.
I am not using a legal pad this time, as they are all in storage. I grabbed a sheet from the poetry notebook and am rolling with it. Don’t be too tight with your outlines. Leave room to wiggle. I outlined week 1. Sometime on November 8, I’ll plop my butt down here and outline week (or floor 2.) I’m waiting until then to do it so I can be flexible with my planning. Two will go more smoothly when I know the characters and world better. All I could outline now would be some codeword in it, like Hansbach. If you get that reference, we can party.
I loathe outlines, as half the fun of writing is watching what happens next. I have mental outlines of fantasy trilogies that might never see daylight because I already know the ending. The lone time I’ve outlined was that first Nano story, and I tore it up. The whole thing was just the stations of the cross with UFOs.
This outline will be a little harder as this idea is a Diablo-esque dungeon crawl with world-building touches thrown in. I plan to do one floor below the city each week of Nano as a world-building exercise to flash out cultures and magic systems for something else I’ll write later. It also marks the umpteenth thing in a row that features my characters going down into the earth.
Self-analysis is one of the biggest advantages of writing. I know enough to spot the tea leaves in my projects. My ex-wife started popping up in Nano 2019, another downer about the underground beneath a city. I added that up and figured out Second Wife was still in the sediment, so when it inevitably felt like she was sniffing around again, I was just like, “Whatever, dude. No reason to get wound up. We probably won’t care if we watch that rerun.”
One can never be too sure about exes while living in chaos, as I do by design, but I saw her move coming and enjoyed riding it out and finding my best friend again for a minute. I have no further steps in that relationship outlined. Even the little bit of outline today pulled something up from the dregs. Do not shrink from those insights when they come, as they are gold. Today’s outline gold was the realization that everything going down in my recent pieces while doing shadow work is just another symptom of the worst-case scenario. I pissed away a lot of years trying to fix things the wrong way. A broken GPS took me two hundred miles from my goal, so I’m going the right way, just further behind. I am excited about going in the right direction, though. I can go faster on the familiar ground, so there’s a chance I won’t be so far behind.
This last thought about outlines, and I’ll hush. Do not, under any circumstances, stick so closely to an outline that you make your story suffer. Even when trying to outline, I left a lot of stuff open. Here’s what I have so far:
[Dungeon Crawl] Eye of the Beholder (SNES)/Diablo from the Tank’s perspective
(hired by a former lover of Med?)
Nov. 1-3 –Exposition (Med in action?)
Nov 4-8 week I
4th – Party assembles (Start with a tavern brawl to introduce the party. Or Med witnesses an attack on an innocent?).
5th – MacGuffin
6th-8th First Floor
Week II –Second Floor.
I’ll screw around the rest of today, as the edible is kicking in, and get rocking on the first (this was written before posting.)
Damon Kadam Unmasked 