It’s Almost Time!

NaNoWriMo 2013 is going to be a new experience for me, for a couple reasons.

1. I have made a serious effort over the course of the month to create an outline to work from.

Not just an outline, but a sense of character, place, drama, trauma and core identities.

You see, much of the bear that revising Lindorm has been might have been averted with a bit more planning. Not just an A-happens, B-happens, C-happens (I did have a set of (digital) cards that made me feel ready but I didn’t look at after day-3). I needed to understand the internal workings of these imaginary people if they were going to be understood in the real world.

Of course, some of that trouble was not knowing myself at the time, my own core hurts and needs, and since one’s first protagonist is usually one’s self, this resulted in a lot of blind writing.  I kept being told Linnea is interesting/engaging/unique, but I had to take other people’s word for it.

So now I try to have things like a moral premise, and a midpoint reversal.

And I can name my genre, which surprised me, but is beginning to make more sense (considering my personal spread on the F-T spectrum). This story is a Mystery-Romance (or a Romance-Mystery. They’re both main genres, so I’m not sure before I write it which element is going to come out “on top”).

2. The novel I’m writing is not based on a folk or fairytale– modernized or not. A departure from all my other stories.

This story is an indulgence of all the popular-story elements I have collected over the years.  All the stuff that I gape at, and consider gutsy (and frankly, something like Twilight seems so self-indulgent it would take a lot of nerve for me to write something like that), or even outrageous, I continue to see authors who just GO for it and pull it off.

Shameless.

Like in Waking Rose where you have ninjas (NINJAS!) and you totally buy the ninja-fight at the end. That took guts (along with the unbelievably outrageous villain– I mean really? Black market organs?) and just unashamedly diving in and rolling with the story premise, it all. works.

This year’s story capitalizes on the current popularity of the BBC Sherlock, in a storyworld where Cumberbatch and Freeman lookalikes have been hired for a Teen-Sherlock spinoff.

Only, because they were hired for their appearances, none of the actors is particularly like the character he plays on the show.

Sherlock’s actor is more like Freeman’s Watson in temperament, and when he meets the girl who will eventually play Lestrade’s kid sister, he has no problem seeing her as the more “Sherlockian” of their pair.

So the novel is a layering of the story being told for television, trying to find a missing girl, and the “real world” mystery of exposing a group responsible for human trafficking, before those criminals decide to destroy the evidence. (And there’s your ticking clock.)

NaNoWriMo: 30 days to write 50,000 words on a new piece of fiction.

I’ve been writing a post each day through the month of October. All about getting Ready for NaNoWriMo.

It was a person at the Fairbanks NaNo Meet & Greet yesterday who noted:

“”NaNo itself is going to seem like a break to you after posting all through October: 30 days of work that doesn’t have to be cleaned up for public consumption.”

Yum. I’m looking forward to that. :)

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