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Jim Castanella’s Private Blog

I’m participating in NaNoWriMo, or “National Novel Writing Month,” where people try to write a bunch of words for a novel in November. I have a very hard time creating structure or even being able to imagine it, so my writing style is to look at a story that already exists and rewrite it piece by piece into a different story. Sometimes word-for-word, but eventually sentence-by-sentence, then paragraph-by-paragraph, and eventually chapter by chapter. The idea is to have it be the story be completely different but have the same, I don’t know, skeleton, because I can’t conceive of that. This time, it’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula. I do not intend to have as many words or even sentences as the original Dracula, a story I have not read before and refuse to read until the moment I need to rewrite it. You may notice that it breaks down very quickly, where I just try to take the gist of a paragraph like, “something foreboding is happening.” Well, I can write a sentence like that! Is it any good? Probably not! But authorship isn’t about being the best, it’s about making deadlines.

1st of November

2nd of November