It Begins

To tell the truth, it?s been a long, long time since I?ve sat down in front of a blank monitor screen and belted out a good ol? fashioned story. Blog posts, sure ? Facebook tirades, of course ? fiction? Wellllllllllllll, that?s a horse of a different color.

Inspired by a couple friends who won it last year, I decided to sign up for NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month ? nanowrimo.org) in September and have been eagerly awaiting the start of November to finally belt out some good ol? fashioned story. I sought long and hard for the story ? this isn?t short fiction where I can just peer into the crack of the blinds and make a coherent 5,000-10,000 word observation about two people and their dysfunctional relationship to one other. 50,000 words is a lot of words. The story has to be big enough for the number.

I found the story, actually, in an old short story I?d written about a jillion years ago. While the short story was a day slice of life for a distant brother and sister, it was clear enough to me that a much bigger story existed around it and so I decided to take that on.

During the last half of October, after deciding on my course, I bent my head to the task of fleshing out the characters and story arc, with the emphasis on character. If I had to place myself into a genre box, I would confidently climb into the one marked Literary Fiction; I have great faith in my characters and their ability to create story where I falter. So I plotted out a beginning and a middle to my story but chose to not plan out the end, preferring to let my characters who will be fully functional by that point, do so on their own.

So with much anticipation, November began. And I didn?t. Up until last night at around 11:30pm, I have been on vacation for the Phish Halloween weekend in Indio, CA.

(Coincidentally enough, much of the story is located in a town not far from Indio called Victorville where I spent a few years visiting my dad and stepmom. So we?ll call that trip research. LOL)

I did manage to cobble some 2,000 odd words together between the airport and the airplane last night so I?m not starting from scratch. But I look forward to this weekend when I can do all the catching up and pulling ahead that I will need as the month waxes and my attention wanes.

Good luck to all the NaNo-ers!