A plot flickers in a dark and stormy mind ...
Half of you are thinking, "What the ***?" -- and the other half are thinking, "It's that time, again?" What am I talking about? November is National Novel Writing Month (NanoWriMo); participants pledge to write a 50, 000 word novel in 30 days. It can be done; I've done it, and so have thousands of others. It shames me to write it, but it was 4 years ago that I did my first "Nano" novel on a now-defunct laptop. (BTW, Karyl, I did back it up on two drives, as well as print a copy.) This year, unless I'm lucky, I may be handwriting most of the novel since I really write better in front of the TV than in isolation with the desktop. Call me crazy (it's been done before), but I will get it done ... or get hand cramps in the attempt.
Of course, it means that most of my jewelry projects, quilt designs, and doll dresses will be placed on hold during November ... and luckily the grading will be a tad lighter on the essay side since we're doing an "I" scrapbook instead of a traditional essay for our project. We'll see how many kids finish it by next week's deadline.
My first (though not last) "nano" novel told the tale of a were-jaguar in search of her missing brother. She drives out to East Texas (hey, they say write what you know -- well, I know the drive to Tyler pretty well) and gets hooked up with a Texas Ranger who's searching for some nasty drug dealers who're capturing college kids for nefarious rites. (Think the Matamoros drug dealer murders down near the border.) Her grandmother is a curandera who gives the Ranger a scapular medal to help the woman control the first change ... yes, it's a romance (of sorts), and it is VERY rough in spots ... but I got it done in (more or less) 1 month.
I still haven't forgotten the day when the principal had us at an in-service; I had just started the novel, and the woman walked into a bar. I think I had the biker bar in mind; however, since I've never been in the biker bar, I made it a more normal country bar ... and a man walks through the door. I had no clue who he was -- then I had to pay attention to the speaker, a brain research specialist, and didn't get a chance to return to the story until lunch. Then everyone wanted me to eat with them -- they were willing to pay -- but I wanted to find out who the guy was! When I told them that I was writing -- and I had no idea who this new character was -- they couldn't understand. "If you're the writer, then you should know," one insisted. Well, I didn't know -- and she didn't know. The only one who DID know was Dirk, and he didn't reveal his motivation for coming after Lena until another 20 pages had passed. (He turned out to be the hero after all.)
This year's "Nano" novel may be set near my 85-year-old high school. I've tried getting the novel off the ground several times -- I need to locate the opening scenes I wrote last summer. My other alternative is a YA novel about a magic user who's coming into her power ... and, to tell the truth, I could combine the setting of one with the characters of the other ... Sad to say, it's hard to write about teenagers and even harder to write about people my own age. We're at such very different stages in the life journey. Of course, there's always the idea of wisdom + youth. What could you do if you had the energy and resilience of youth added to the life experience (and wisdom, hopefully) of age? The fae (Fair Folk, elves) do -- but only Tolkein's elves make consistently choices to do good; the traditional fair folk are not always so benign, and some are actively evil. I read Moning's Faefever series -- I had to stop when the Fairy prince and his minions gang raped the heroine to make her his slave. That's not the end of the series -- but I won't start reading again until book 5 comes out. Moning defended the scene, but it put me off her writing for over a year -- and I don't recommend the series, even for hard-core romance/ fantasy readers, unless you're willing to deal with nastiness on a level I haven't seen in a long time. The only writer who came close to that was Tami Hoag; her main characters are torture puppies near the book's climax. They risk their lives to put the bad guys away ... although they're willing to pay the price, I'm not always willing to share the experience.
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