So I have committed to NaNoWriMo for the third year. Don't get too excited--I haven't actually "won" yet. Just as I got rolling with NaNoWriMo 2011, I got a job. It was 20 hours, but did not lend itself to creativity. NaNo was a kind of coping mechanism, as well as a "why not?" and a "what if?" and a "we'll see." I tried it out, initially, to keep my friend Mrs. Darwin company. She made it to the 50,000 on time! But even though I was short on November 30th, I actually produced something that a few people find worth reading, and made it to 50,000 words in December! I've submitted it once to a novel competition run by Tuscany Press, but it wasn't their thing--no feedback, so no real way of knowing why it wasn't their thing. I do see its faults, though, even though I've revised once. Perhaps it will come out of the virtual cobwebs someday.
NaNo Project 2011 was unified. I had one idea--what if the one of the daughters of the merman and Margaret in Matthew Arnold's poem "The Foresaken Merman" came to shore looking for her mother? I think I came up with some interesting answers. NaNo 2012 was decidedly not focused. I started with one idea--a children's lit travel/steampunk adventure. My characters were modeled on my daughters. My setting was a real place in the real world. The beginning of the adventure involved a real historical figure. All of this, I found too limiting. Mid-way through, I switched to a dystopian fantasy based on an idea from Celtic folk ballads: the lover goes off to seek his fortune, extracting a promise from his beloved to remain true. But what if everything he knows is destroyed while he is away? What if she changes? What if she is unable to remain true? I think I produced better prose than my first NaNo, even if the story didn't quite come together.
What I did manage to create was a world of sorts, and though I have toyed with other ideas--autobiographical coming-of-age, autobiographical coming-of-age with vampires--I think I will stick with the world-building for now. I will write new words, but I think I can flesh out places and people and histories in my current world rather than moving to something completely different. So I'm not going to be as worried about being linear and developing plot. Or at least, that's not quite my plan. We'll see how it works out. Instead, I'm going to be developing the cultish tree-people, and the relationship between my protagonist, Alina, and her youngest sister, Magda. Unless I change my mind before midnight tonight!
My posts will hopefully be regular. They will not necessarily be titled. I'm trying to think in scenes rather than plots. Wish me luck!
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