I'm a little blogged out and I'm sure y'all are sick of seeing me pop up in your blog feeds. The good news for all involved is that while I'm intending to scale things back to two or maybe three posts a week, there's an excellent chance that I'm going to fall off the face of the earth all together. Again.
So I'm a little bit surprised that I'm posting today. Maybe I shouldn't be. Surprised, that is. I am, after all, procrastinating on my brand spankin' new NaNoWriMo project and what better way to do that than to write something else, right? As of the moment I'm typing this sentence, the project in question is a whopping 544 words long (only 49,456 more to go!). There's no plot, no set genre, and my main character doesn't have a name but other than that I think it's going very well. It's going to be interesting (possibly maddening) to see where this thing goes because I honestly don't have any idea. I have absolutely nothing planned out.
In my previous NaNoWriMo years, I started with a main character (with a name) and a genre. For example, the first year I wrote a chick lit/romance novel which had certain elements I knew were needed. Heroine? Check. Love interest? Check. Boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy gets girl back, boy and girl ride off into the sunset together? Check, check, check and check. So while I didn't exactly know how I was going to get there, I at least knew where there was. The second year I wrote a YA urban fantasy about a sixteen year old demon hunter so I knew there would be some demon fightin' scenes and a world in peril plot which would eventually lead to a resolution where the world is saved. So again, while I couldn't see the entire path to the end, I still knew it was there and approximate where it was going. It's that whole headlights at night metaphor.
But this year, I don't even know what I'm doing. This year, my headlights are out completely. This year, I'm fumbling through the woods and I don't have a working flashlight. I mean, it kind of feels like a contemporary fiction piece, free of any supernatural elements and set in an everyday place, but I'm only 544 words into the damn thing and the only thought I had before I started was "I want to write unhappy people" (as if I ever write anything else, I know) which lead to my first line. There's still plenty of time for this thing to careen into something completely different.
And you know what? I kind of can't wait for that to happen.
Cheers!