NaNoWriMo 2023 Twenty-four Hours in Vancouver

What more is there for me to say, I'm participating in NaNoWriMo again this November. It is the third NaNo event I've done this year, as I did Camp NaNoWriMo in both April and July. And like the former two, I'm doing a complete rewrite of an old novel.

This month, it's Twenty-four Hours in Vancouver. There are a few things worth nothing as I'm getting into this. First, I wrote the initial story in November of 1999. It was, in fact, a story about 24 hours I had in Vancouver. I had gone there for a quick get out of town, and since I was living in Portland, Oregon at the time, Vancouver, British Columbia was not so very far away. I wrote the original in a period of about 2 days. It wasn't much of a novel, properly speaking, being just over 17,000 words. It wasn't even much of a story. But I also wrote it 24 years ago, and things for me have changed a great deal.

Since I rewrote Exile in July, Twenty-four Hours in Vancouver is now the oldest manuscript I have. I think I always wanted to rework it, but I never knew how. I think in the past, I thought I would just have to go into it and work little bits out. But as I've been in the business of rewriting old work this year, I have found that it is a completely new thing. After all, The Cataract of last April retained only the setting of the original piece I wrote in 2001, and I didn't even read the 1993 Exile before I completely rewrote it.

The process is completely different with Twenty-four Hours, mostly because I have a very deep attachment to this piece. It was some time over the summer when I realized what this novel needs. What I decided, simply put, is that this novel is going to be about Sam Foley. And if you don't know who that is, fuck you, you should have bought my novel Undertakers of Rain before it went out of print.

See, Sam was one of the main characters in Undertakers of Rain. He was not the principle main character. And since all of my novels are really one big story, I knew the main character in this one would be Sam. Sam was not written until 2009, which was a whole decade after the original Twenty-four Hours. In an essence, like the last two I've reworked, this one is going to be a completely new novel.

To get ready for this, I reread the original Twenty-four Hours in Vancouver. I will not lament how bad it is. Thematically, it is not very good. It's got an angry young man rant. I was in a bad place back then. There is not clear narrator outside of an I/me character. It goes nowhere. I don't know how much of it I'll keep. For starters the original is written in first person, and the rewrite is third. I also reread Undertakers of Rain. I still like this novel, and I'm grateful to have written it. I have a deep understanding of who Sam is, and this new version of Twenty-four Hours will really be a good study into him.