Well, here we are again in the back half of October, with the caffeine-and-wild-eyed-determination-fueled juggernaut of NaNoWriMo bearing down on us. I attempt NaNo every year. I never win. I can’t seem to get my speed up high enough, consistently enough, to stay on pace.
It still helps, though. The first draft of Gabriel’s City got a lot of its words down on paper during two different Novembers. I’ve made good starts at a few other things in other years. And generally I love the atmosphere of it; for all that writing is presented as a solitary pursuit, it’s one of the few social activities I am pretty much always up for. Come November, I’ll have some friends to come with me to the local geeky coffeehouse with their laptops, and we’ll sit there together sipping lattes and attacking our keyboards. It’s nice to have somebody there to pace you for wordcount, to keep typing when you stop so that you feel the need to start again, to listen sympathetically when you just want to be writing anything but the scene you’re currently slogging through. Someone to suggest ninjas at the crucial moment.
So right now I’m sifting through ideas and trying to decide what I want to work on this November. I’ve narrowed it down to two, and I’ll probably bounce back and forth between them — my attention span also doesn’t care for NaNo’s single-project tunnel vision. I have a post-apocalyptic survivors’ society and a pretty young man with an anxiety disorder to throw into it. I also have a dusty, magic-infused wasteland city and a bounty hunter coming to town with her lipstick perfect and her shotgun loaded. I have an assortment of Cool Bits I want to throw in to make them fun and self-indulgent to write (and, hopefully, to read).
I have… about a plot and a half to split between the two stories so far. But it’s only October 20! That’s plenty of time. Right?