Waterbug: Moving Forward

So, having almost ground to a halt less than 6,000 words into NaNoWriMo, and with only a week left to write the remaining 44,000 words. While my NaNo stats are telling me it'll take 6,300 words per day to finish on time, I don't think saying this won't get done falls under the purview of my usual pessimism. I'm pretty sure it's abso-frakking-lutely guaran-frakking-teed.

However, the sticking point is that I'm definitely still into these characters. As little ahead as I've actually begun to figure out, I like where it's going. I've introduced and started to formulate even more characters who're fun to write. I'm just sorta losing it in a couple areas:

1. Plot's never been my strong suit. Worlds and people in them? Fuggeddaboutit, but as soon as they need something to do to keep an audience entertained for a long time, then we're in trouble. I don't know what the solution is to this other than to keep throwing stuff at the wall until a plot comes together out of the mess.

2. The format. I definitely had a lot more fun writing the script versions of Waterbug than any of my prose attempts. I like letting these characters talk, often to each other. I like interspersing their conversations with action. Where I run into trouble, in prose, is figuring out how to work descriptions of stuff into the mixture. It may not be sexy and glamorous, but I think it'd get me from point A to point B a lot quicker if I could just set the scene in one block of text before two or more characters start talking to each other.

So, I think, since I'm somewhere in the middle of what would be the "pilot" of Waterbug, I'm going to, over the next couple months (3D has been woefully neglected while I've been busy not-writing for NaNoWriMo, so I need to strike up a better balance) work on turning the new content back into script versions to follow a revised version of the scene that I scripted way back in the summer. I've got ideas for other chunks of Earth's outer colonies that I want to explore, people, places, things etc. I've got history. I've got the starts of a handful of distinct colonial cultures. We'll see what happens...