Over a month since my last entry on this bloggy thingy (as Robert Llewellyn of Red Dwarf fame calls it) and I suppose an entry is long overdue. It’s been an interesting month, now that it’s been NaNoWriMo time. I’ve written about it in several posts before (since I started this blog last year just after that month was over) and if I maintain the blog till next year’s NaNo I think I will write about it again.
This year I didn’t have any sort of plan for what I was going to write, except I had a strange scene in my head where a giant man lay dead on the ground, surrounded by a grieving woman and a small child standing a few feet away. Now where the heck that image came from I have no idea, but it sort of stuck in my brain cell so I figured I might as well use it! So that became a sort of starting point…or at least it gave me a tentative title for the thing; “The Giant’s Demise”.
Although when I tried to figure out what had killed the giant, why the woman was grieving and who the small child was I couldn’t exactly figure that out. Just the day before NaNo was to start I had a brainwave; since my parents have gotten REALLY into genealogy and researching their past, perhaps I can let my character do the same. That he finds out about his past relatives…and in amongst these people this giant could be…somewhere.
At last I had a starting point and I began to write about this customer service guy who really hated being on the phone with clients, but was quite good at it…much to his own surprise and how he had inherited a huge traveling trunk from his globe trotting, recently diseased uncle.
Now that I’ve passed the 50,000 word mark on the story I don’t think I am anywhere near closer to finding out who exactly that giant is…but he probably is somewhere in that traveling trunk…and when/if I continue to work on this book in a few months’ time, perhaps he’ll pop up.
Somewhere along the line the story also decided that the title wasn’t that accurate. There was not yet any giant in there, so some new name for it was needed. “Treasure Hunt” is the new working title…which of course will be subject to change at many stages in the writing-rewriting process in the future!
I will say though that this year was a lot tougher to keep the daily writing discipline than previous years. I don’t know if it was the lack of novelty of it all (this being my 4th year) or if it was just me not preparing enough ahead of the period, but during the last week of this I was just eager for the writing to be over…and that is not really how it should be done. It is supposed to be FUN, something you enjoy doing and look forward to. Hopefully with a bit more preparation and plot tinkering ahead of the writing frenzy I can get back to more fun during NaNo 2012!
) if you fail at coming up with the 50K words by November 30. You can always have a go some other month, or write slower, or go take a few pictures to engage those creative brain cells.
