Countown

It's almost time for NaNo and I can say with confidence that I am no closer to knowing where to start come Thursday than I was last week.

My grand plan to deactivate my facebook account came to a screeching halt when I realized that I couldn't access my Spotify account if I did that. I was deactivated for less than a day. Since then it has been a struggle to keep myself away from the website but I've done alright. Apart from scrolling through other people's posts and chatting via messenger with a few people, I've stayed away. It helps that I've blocked it from my home computer but I expect it will be a challenge for me all month.


I went to the NaNoWriMo kick off party! Going to places full of strangers isn't usually my cup of tea and that didn't magically change on Sunday but I met some nice people and as they say the first step is usually the hardest so hopefully now I'll feel free to attend write-ins and the TGIO party in December with a smaller degree of awkwardness.

The best part about it though, was the pep talk by Jim Hines, a writer I had previously never heard of. He talked about some of the usual stuff - it's okay to write crap, there's no One True Way to write a novel, don't rely on your mom for constructive feedback. He also spoke about publishing scams. Awareness of those kinds of things is so critical and I was happy that he was trying to spread the word. Anyway, I appreciated his talk. He was a great speaker, very engaging, and it's always encouraging to hear someone else's success story, particularly when the success story isn't "So I wrote my first novel and now I own a mansion on the moon."

I'm hoping to take some time this week to plan at least a starting point. I have several ideas floating through my brain, including a romance/mystery novel that opens with road rage and telepathy, a mainstream, regular joe work about a girl who gets dumped and has to put her life back together (fiction! I swear!), a re-work of my first NaNo novel to re-set it as YA, or a complete re-write of my second NaNo novel, which I've been dying to finish and haven't quite been able to.

I've been doing a lot of reading about the "rules" for NaNo and trying to decide what I would find acceptable for myself and I haven't been able to make a decision yet. I love my second NaNo novel but I've been wrestling with it for years. It would be nice to dedicate a month to re-writing it from scratch. Then again, I said that was what I was going to do two years ago when I bailed out of NaNo and I'm still basically in the same place.

I guess I'll see what happens on Thursday!