Revving up for NaNoWriMo 2010

Participating in NaNoWriMo last year for the first time I was very skeptical of anyone's ability to write 50,000 words in a single month. Looking back on last year I can see that if I had attended fewer birthday parties (November is popular for birthdays because February is 9 months before; but my own birthday in November does not correspond with that), I could reasonably achieved the 50,000 by November 30th. Instead I 'only' wrote 32,000 words in 3 weeks.

I spent this entire past year thinking about my NaNo 2009 novel which has a working title of "daimon hunting" & have fleshed out some of my characters but it still requires a lot of work. So much work, due to the fact that I have to rearrange chapters, get rid of certain distasteful characters, build others up, tear some of their egos down, etc. I have to completely re-write it. So I'm putting it on the cooling block while I rewrite a novel I started outside of NaNo.

In fact, I had started writing the KH novel about a year before I learned of NaNo, so in 2008 I had begun writing it. I did not have too much direction to the plot line and I was nearly writing a fan fiction piece and just rewriting the characters and the period. That was not working as it became a plot filled with scenes where I would just blow off steam. Its odd how much calmer I could get after killing off a character (and not in the way I had to kill off Cody in the NaNo 2009; that was cruel), these characters were bad and needed to go. Now, I'm reworking the plot, the characters, renaming them and such. I found out that my muse was writing herself into the novels and that had to stop: my nomme de plume is that of my muse and she's no longer allowed in the novels. Period.

The above is my working title and banner for NaNo 2010. Drawing from the forum, I'll just repost the synopsis. I've chosen, since the novel is dark*, to go under the genre of horror and the supernatural; I don't seem to play well with the other Christian writers.

Synopsis: Snowed Out

She is forced to leave all that is familiar to flee supernatural forces who oppose every good deed she does with increasingly dangerous consequences.

Excerpt: Snowed Out

The night hung heavy and the chill dug into the skin. If it had been any other evening, she probably would not have noticed, but the dampness caused her to stop and gaze up as fog rolled across her field of vision. Gazing back at the door she had just ran out of, the door that she had just slammed, the dark cold seemed to close in upon her. It hadn’t been hard, but when her heart broke it felt like she was walking barefooted on crystal shards. A whole world built carefully in love, faith and hope was gone; forever darkened. Helene’s vision darkly reverberated as a ripple emanated from the warmly lit house and slammed her into the lawn.

And yes, I cheated and wrote my opening paragraph ahead of time. Unlike last year, I don't have the same strings of unending time: I wasn't working and hadn't gotten any interviews all month and I was probably about 3-4 weeks into depression. This year, I'm determined not to do the depression thing, besides last years was spiritually oriented too. I've got classes and a few papers to write that are due December 1st or somewhere in the last week of November. The nerd in me is pressing me to write those papers already and get them done this week, along with my Halloween costume and the last dregs of research for the NaNo. It's part of the craziness that is NaNo.

And I just wrote my first most in-depth and lengthy post in months on writing. =)

* From 8th grade through my junior year in high school I wrote a serial murder story with input from my then-best friend. The characters were careful reconstructions of certain fellow students. That's probably not as bad as a fellow friend & later boyfriend who was found with a hit list in his locker. Also, I'm not known for chick lit or 'run in the meadow' or 'find prince charming' or what I like to call 'bubble gum perky'.