Announcing the end of the one day novelist: National Novel Writing Month starts today. The idea is to sign up on the website www.nanowrimo.org and keep track of the number of words you have written on your own novel over the course of November. Winners are people who make it to 50,000 words by the end of the month. There is no prize- it’s like Farmville- no one asks you if you have real tomatoes from Farmville, right? Same with Nanowrimo- if you win, you have the satisfaction of winning, and a rough draft of a novel. Pretty cool, I’d say.
For the last several years I have started this big adventure in writing a novel, and not finished…this year, I think I have it figured out, though. I heard a writer being interviewed on the radio- don’t remember who, and he said, “To write a novel, you have to have your characters make choices they can’t undo.” That has been my problem- every year I start out with characters that I come to love, and then I become overprotective. “don’t go to that party,” I think, “you’ll get pregnant!” or “you can’t call the lawyer, they just make things worse!” By the time I get about 30,000 words in, I am bored to tears, then it’s Thanksgiving and I run out of time.
So, my solution this year is to go to greek myths, specifically, Jason and the Argonauts. All of Jason’s bad decisions got made thousands of years ago, I just have to show him dealing with them. I’ve got a lot of notes, some research I printed off the internet, and will start tomorrow. I’ll try to post a word count here on the blog, in case anyone cares, and I’ll let you know at the end of the month if I have won. Also, if anyone has title suggestions, please comment
Strawberry Fields for Breakfast 