Wednesday, November 11, 2009

Left turns

Two Tuesdays in a row, I have not managed to post on Tuesday. *bad Tuesday blogger bad bad* Last Tuesday I can blame on being very sick and just did not have the ability to come up with anything. As for yesterday, well, I still can't get to the blog from home and I was too busy to do it at work. But enough with excuses... Here I am on Wednesday.

A few days before Nano began, I had finally settled on a project. I was going to resurrect the erotic sci-fi vampire story I had begun a few years ago. Now, the issue was that I couldn't just pick up where I had left off. I had written myself into a corner with that one. There was a mystery/adventure for the heroine but the motivations behind the bad guys were very fuzzy and not clearly defined. So I took some of the basics from my old plot and decided to keep X and Y. But what about Z, what about that mystery/adventure for the heroine? I began exchanging emails with Andrea (who is my plotting saviour, I can bounce ideas off her all day long and she either knocks them down or hits them back with questions that keep my mind moving) and suddenly I had the basic building blocks of the new story. And someone that had been a friend to the heroine was now the new big bad. All right! We're on our way. I was ready for Nano.

Then something happened... Monday morning (Nov. 2) just the second day of Nano and while I was driving to the train station a kernel of something popped into my head. It was a title (And believe me, that's unusual, I hate trying to come up with titles). Suddenly, I was off. This title was for a whole new story - shapeshifter menage type story. I spent that day figuring out my main characters names, what they looked like, their relationships with one another and their world.

So there I was now with two things I wanted to work on. What to do? Well, I'm working on both. I'm editing what was previously written in my sci-fi vampire story (more like hacking it to pieces) and spending time developing my characters and plot of the shifter menage. I won't hit 50,000 words for the month. I'll be happy if I have 5,000 new words this month. My goal is simply to actively work every day this month. If I do that, then I've "won".

2 comments:

Colleen M. said...

It's always fun when you get that great idea that you just have to work on - but not when you're in the middle of a project. I know my biggest downfall is getting a new idea and then stopping what I'm working on to start that idea and then I get another idea and round and round and nothing gets done.

Sheila said...

Yeah, I'm struggling a bit with that myself. Those plot bunnies that bit me hard the week before NaNoWriMo are still clamoring for attention. When I can't get them to shut up, I go and jot down notes on what they're trying to tell me. Hopefully it will be enough that when I get back to them in December, I'll remember what I wanted to do. But in the meantime, I'm trying hard to stay focused on my NaNo story and not get distracted by other things. Well, at least not by TOO many other things!