NaNoWriMo 2019. Part Two. My project is…..

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NaNoWriMo 2019. Part Two. My project is…..

The decision has been made,

It’s that time of the year again; when everyone who is participating in the NaNoWriMo challenge starts to announce their projects.

You might recall that a few weeks ago, I was agonising over which one of my ideas to base this year’s challenge on. In case you missed it, here’s the link to the post.

NaNoWriMo 2019. Part One, Preparation.

Anyway, I’ve been considering the possibles and have decided that the one I will be attempting this year is…

The Hitman and the Thief.

Here’s the cover concept,

It was a close-run thing, I will still be doing the others at some time, but this one has caught my imagination and I can see a few of the early bits of action in my mind.

The story actually grew from an exercise in my world-building course, where I asked students to come up with a couple of short paragraphs to include action and backstory. I was trying to illustrate the point that backstory could be put anywhere, that it didn’t need to be a dry and boring list of facts. Anyhow, this is what I actually wrote as my illustration.

The shot rang out and concrete
was chipped by my head.

“Come on,” gasped Lydia,
grabbing my arm, “run!”

I was dragged down the street,
in and out of the shadows cast by the flickering lights, “keep your head down
Dan,” she said.

“It’s just like on Gallix,” I
managed to wheeze as, bent double; I followed her around a corner. Out of sight
for a second we dodged into a dark alleyway. There were no more shots, but we
could hear running feet and shouts.

“When we had to get away from
Kalindra and her boys,” she finished while I tried to fill my lungs. “I had to
save you then.”

“I thought that I saved you?”
I replied.

“In your dreams.” We stood in
the dark and tried to get our breath back, shrinking into the darkness as two
men, guns held in front of them, ran past us. The blatant show of weapons
reminded me that I was out of my depth here, far from my old stomping ground.
They probably had the local law in their pockets, we were the outsiders.

I was getting angrier
and angrier with Fliss Bauer, back on Gallix. ‘It’ll be easy,’ she had said,
‘just get in and do this for me, it’ll wipe your slates clean’.

And we’d believed her.

I never gave it much thought, but someone later suggested
that it could form part of a bigger story.

Regular readers of this blog will know that I usually start
at the beginning and write a linear story. I don’t do scenes out of sequence. For
me to work backwards and forwards from the middle would be a new departure, I
had to envisage a start that led me to that scene; and where I would go
afterwards.

Of course, the whole idea is to do 50,000 words in November, so apart from a brief couple of paragraphs, I’ve just got the outline so far