Oh, yeah, One Post Wonder still exists.

I've been writing more or less consistently since the end of August, which still kind of surprises me.  After an initial spurt where I tried using 4thewords.com to gamify it, I gave up on that but still kept writing.  Daily writing has slid back to bidaily writing to occasionally every three days, but it hasn't stopped yet.  And, most impressively, this is a second draft, revision of a novel I wrote in two NaNoWriMos in the previous decade.

It did kind of divide up nicely into two pieces, but they're both too close to 50,000 words to be complete novels, so I'm trying to do it as a single novel for now.  I am adding some words, mostly because when I wrote the second half I gave a secondary character her own viewpoint chapters, and I'm trying to add them back in to the first half.  Maybe strict alternation is not going to work completely, since Janine may not have as much happening with her as Philip does, but I'm trying it anyway.  I'm still not quite up to the end of the first part, since I am being very forgiving with my quota.  Especially when I'm writing new words and not just tweaking old scenes, I'm settling for less than 500 words at a sitting, and generally that's less than half an hour.  But it is NOT ZERO and I am NOT STOPPING YET.

This comes after a few long stretches of not feeling like any of my games, so perhaps it hasn't been as drastic a change as that.  If I'd gone from four hours of Skyrim or Sims 2 every night to wedging in writing, it might have been too much.  I do sometimes think wistfully of playing more games, but I think it's really more reasonable in any case.  Though I have close to six columns of computer game icons on my desktop, and more that aren't even on there (ones that my kids bought on Steam and I never installed, or that I bought on GOG.com and never installed).

I haven't quite settled on a title for the book yet--when I wrote it, the two parts were "Bleen" and "Grue", and the overall title was "Many Worlds".  But I find myself calling it "Bleen & Grue" more often than I do "Many Worlds", so who knows.  If this thing should ever end up getting published by someone other than me, then they'll get the final decision on the title anyway, so no point in my stressing over it.

At the rate I'm going, it may take a full year to get through the revision, though I keep hoping that the second half will end up requiring less revision.  A lot of what I've done so far has just been taking the random flailing from early in the book, before I found the plot and settled on the way the world works, and making it more consistent, adding the viewpoints I mentioned above, and bringing in a few more characters to flesh out the characters' somewhat sparse personal lives.  Oh, and keeping Janine and Philip's relationship from being too firmly settled from the beginning.  
The initial idea I'd had for it was just to have somebody flipping randomly between parallel worlds, and I threw in a whimsical alien at the beginning just to be interesting.  Zombies turned up later because I was reading Max Brooks's Zombie Survival Guide at the time.  As has happened before, my vague wanderings acquired a plot eventually, and so I've had to try to bring the vague wanderings into line with the plot.  In particular, when the main character, Philip, was being randomly swapped into another world by an alternate self, I had to figure out why this was happening.  I've almost considered writing up an outline, but I haven't managed to follow through on it.  I wrote my first draft in vim (as I'm writing this right now), but I've been trying to use Scrivener for my second draft.  I'm sure I'm not using most of the features, but it has been nice a few times to be able to drag-and-drop scenes from one place to another.

What keeps tapping at my brain is an idea for a big huge fantasy series type thing, based on the Lorenai pbem game I played back in the late 90's.  When the game came to an end, the game data was all made available, and I've whiled away many hours poring over it since then.  Looking at it recently has made me want to convert it into something more novelish, and I swear I've probably come up with about half a dozen novels by now.  It'll be interesting to turn it from a somewhat dry email game based heavily on Middle Earth (my faction operated out of Minas Tirith, for instance) into something with a life of its own, but I've got plenty of ideas.  In my own fashion, I'm planning to just take place and character names, run them through rot13 and then massage them into something pronounceable.  For instance, "Minas Tirith" would become "Zvanf Gvevgu", which has morphed into "Zon Vivica".  I'm resisting trying to make up an entire conlang for the series along with everything else.  Anyway, I've promised myself that I'll try to at least start on this next after I finish "Many Worlds".  I may even outline this time, just to see if I can make it work.

I should dig out a few short stories sometime, too, and see if I can work those into something publishable.  A lot of the ones I've posted online already, I'm not sure if I could interest an editor in, but I do have a handful that I never did...