Dithering: Next Writing Project

I signed up to participate in the National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) and have a general outline for a project. But since I'm back from vacation, it doesn't hold the same magic for me.

But I like the theme: how an ambitious career woman, longing for adventure, slips over to the Dark Side, then has to figure her way out. More of the art world underground. Another exotic setting: Thailand.

But hmmm... I keep being pulled back into memoir stuff. My "true adventures."

And I think I'm having literary pretensions. Don't want to be a "mere" genre-writer, crafting well-plotted thrillers. Oh no, not me. I want to be Virginia Woolf or Graham Greene or Jonathan Franzen.

Today I pulled out an old "chronology" of journal entries and other observations laying out the tick-tock around the decision to abandon my career at Hillside for a new life. It was a serious effort to sort out how I went from organizational darling to a malcontent. How much could I blame others? How much responsibility do I have to own? When I wrote it originally, it revealed to me that the "winter of my discontent" went in tandem with a very pleasing springtime of my creativity, as I pursued writing, video-making... and fishing.

I was thinking it might make an interesting novella/memoir, published as a short e-book for career women to read on their Blackberries in airport....

Stay tuned...